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I'm sorry, none of you needed this in your life, but I just had to share it.

Seriously, could we make some cash by having news outlets commission us to explain this shit for them? I know, I know, they could just look it up themselves, but… apparently they don't know how to do that.

Imagine telling people from like early 2000s internet that sad frog would go mainstream as a symbol for white nationalism. What the flying fuck is this planet.

I blame dat boi

Someone should point whoever wrote that in our direction.

Because fuck researching topics

I saw an article talking about this on MSN, and I thought is was just another attempt to stir up controversy about Trump, but it's even more retarded than I could have imagined.

Ha ha, another case of old media not understanding the new media. So sad. Old media cannot understand new media. I can't wait for TV to die.

You can sleep tonight knowing Pepe is awake.

"Pepe the Frog is a huge favorite white supremacist meme," Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center told NBC News of the meme.

reads headline

When you consider the time you have to reach a set quota for articles on a certain topic, I don't think it was poorly researched. Maybe just incorrectly researched, at best.

Here's an article that explains "why" and "how" Pepe allegedly came to be associated with white nationalist sentiment.

Long made short, it seems like they focused on a @JaredTSwift from Twitter as well as a couple of other Twitter folks for their information (I think Jared leans left and makes fun of the alt-right, but the account is very silly)

And then, recently, things took a turn: Pepe became socially unacceptable.
Turns out that was by design.
@JaredTSwift is an anonymous white nationalist who claims to be 19 years old and in school someplace on the West Coast. He told me there is “an actual campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies.”

It began in late 2015 on /r9k/, a controversial 4chan board where, as on any message board, it can be difficult to discern how serious commenters are being or if they’re just fucking around entirely. Nevertheless, /r9k/ has been tied to Elliot Rodger--the UC Santa Barbara shooter who killed six people in 2014--who found fans there, and GamerGate. There, Pepe transformed from harmless cartoon to big green monster.
“We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association,” @JaredTSwift said.

I can't tell if the journalist got trolled or something else myself.

You can't expect an actual journalist to get memes right. People who like memes don't understand memes. And a lot of it is just the "ironic" use of memes. So that makes it hard to parse what's ironic and what's actually real.

tl;dr: They tried real hard, but they just weren't very good at it.

Quality research.

It was sooooo difficult to research this obscure message board culture! If only there was a website out there that explained the culture and origin of these things so that we could avoid making our news items reactionary and sensationalist!

To think all they had back then was Crazy Frog.

the fucking barbarians.

And just like that I lose any faith in the southern poverty law center, and any work they put out. Seriously, what's next? Pokemon being satanic monsters again? DnD being responsible for teen suicide again? Christ alive, these people.

Still not quite as bad as

I can see where the confusion comes from, but it doesn't make this any less hilarious or stupid.

Sigh, since when was Pepe a White Surpremicist meme? Wouldn't Moon Man make more sense?

@Verbose
I dunno, in my opinion it's pretty damn simple to explain:
"Pepe the Frog spawned from a website called 4chan, a hotbed of the so-called "internet culture", where it became a very popular icon. Therefore, anything connected to or originating from it or its derivatives, including but not limited to the alt-right, will likely use it as a symbol as well."
See?

That's the actual answer, 1, but what the author was claiming is certainly possible too. Just because a meme can be used in just about any way, some are used in some ways a lot more than others.

I think the mistake in the Daily Beast article is that the author's source were users on Twitter who were as close to being anonymous as possible. The same author acknowledged that memes are often ironic and used for whatever, but when you have to present an angle, I think they did so with some sources that are as good as you're going to get for memes.

Also, that author couldn't just come here and read the Pepe article. We all know our articles may be slow to be updated. And, as you say, any update may have just simply been omitted, because we accept the reality that memes can be used for whatever reason.

That's not the understanding of someone not involved in Web culture. I don't think they had time to come to incorporate culturally shared understandings of a community they aren't a part of for the sake of an article they were assigned to write but probably don't care about…

Because, let's be real: we're dorky nerds. We insult other people for not knowing about stuff they don't even care about.

This is about as good as you're going to get for an a Journalism BA not born in the 1990's or later.

I feel like these journalists just looked at these three pictures and came to their own conclusions.

Pepe is way too popular to be pigeonholed, but yeah, it technically is a favorite meme among /pol/ and friends.

Furthermore, I'm sure NBC would consider the likes of /r/the_donald to be "white nationalist" as well regardless of accuracy. The subreddit had a "pepe week" recently and pepe is still posted frequently. Possibly the only memes that are more popular there are the ones directly associated with Trump, like "HIGH ENERGY" etc.

This is kind of like how news outlets often believe that /pol/ is all of 4chan. It's not true, but it's understandable as a mistake.

Its funny that Ben Carson (a black man) is on an image supposedly supporting white nationalism

I thought Moonman would become a "white nationalist symbol." I figure the meme would get some controversy, but I didn't expect NBC would actually declare Pepe to be involved in white nationalism, despite the fact that Pepe the frog originated from a webcomic that had nothing to do with white nationalism at all. I really wonder where these journalists did there research.

Oh nooooo.
Oh my god.
Are we all white supremacists now?

UPDATE

Hillary's official website made a page giving an explanation about Pepe

And it mentions nothing of /pol/ or 4chan, where most of these edits came from in the first place.

Congratulations, everyone, memes are now an official political talking point! We're now officially relevant to world events. Pat yourself on the back before crying in the corner when you realize what we've gotten ourselves into.

Just curious: Who else is in this photo?
Notably, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes the government was behind the 9/11 (and that Newtown was “completely fake”), and Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, whose racism and bigotry is so egregious that Twitter banned him from using their site.

lol

If this isn't enough reason to avoid voting for Hillary I don't know what is. It's a hopeless cause at this point. I can't believe I actually scrolled through the entire thing holy shit I haven't cringed this physically hard all year this is definitely in my top 5 of biggest cringe-fests it looks like pure satire.

Also let's never forget this:

when memes become mainstream political discussion

This is going to be brought up in the first debate, isn't it? We are literally going to have two candidate debate over internet memes, aren't we?

Great. Another clickbait, 2010s-Internet-based article by a major media company run by 30~60-yr-olds who know nothing about racism and dank memays.

Just die please.

At this point, anything Clinton does is worse than just doing nothing would be.

She had the advantage of being able to portray herself as the saner alternative to Trump, but by doing shit like this she makes Trump look smarter by comparison.

+1 Confirm

I'm fucking done. I honestly hope Trump wins after this.

This reminds me that story fox news did on anonymous back in 08

Nothing good comes out of politics intermingling with internet culture.

After that, All of my impressions impressions of her can be summed up in one image.

I wouldn't even call it mischief anymore

I am done.
I am so done.
I just can't comprehend this.
Here in Puerto Rico, we have had our share of idiots, which is why we're screwed. But not even Bobby Newport incarnate (one of the candidates for governor here) is this idiotic.

How do these people sleep at night knowing they sullied the purity of Pepe?

?? mixed signals ??

PEPE is a shit meme anyways. Those who support either Trump the giant douche or Hillary the turd sandwhich should kill themselves because they`re inviting disaster to America. The only solution to this voting problem is ANARCHY

The sources of the original report got interviewed in the Daily Caller and said it was a prank

The Economist went all in

Heat Street went all in and retracted an earlier report by Ian Miles Cheong

#thekekoffensive is happening on Twitter.

In summary the Internet is laughing its ass off while your mother is yelling at you for that time you posted a nazi frog to Facebook six years ago.

I wrote this up about the whole mess: Frog Wars

I think the nazi frog controversy is distinct enough for a standalone article. It is a meme rather than an event because it is primarily an idea. Most of the content was shamelessly stolen from the existing Pepe the Frog and Alt-Right entries.

Known issues:

• Reliability: I didn't double check the quotations from the MSM to confirm them.
• Reliability: I have not watched either of the Youtube videos to confirm their descriptions.
• Content: I feel like we should have more examples of the internet's reaction (ridiculing the reports and creating related content about nazi memes), but no one example speaks out.
• Formatting: The article needs something to break up the wall of text.
• Formatting: I don't know how to properly include related articles or mark this article as a child of others.
• Formatting: References are one big list. Is there an easy way to make them or a table or is this done in '90s style html4?

I have another half dozen related images which I will try to add to the gallery later tonight.