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ADL now lists ‘Pepe the Frog’ meme as hate symbol

A cartoon frog tied to anti-Semitism and racism that has become an unofficial mascot of the alt-right has been added to the Anti-Defamation League’s list of hate symbols, joining the ranks of the swastika and the Confederate battle flag, the group said Tuesday.

The frog, known as Pepe the Frog, did not originally have anti-Semitic connotations, the league said in a news release. The meme proliferated in outlets such as 4chan, an anonymous online message board, and the social media site Reddit, and morphed into a symbol associated with anti-Jewish and bigoted ideas, the release said.

Alex Goldman, a host of the podcast Reply All, which tells stories about the internet, described 4chan in a recent show as “like a nightmarish cesspool that is full of offensive stuff.”

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The alt-right, a movement of extremists that uses white-supremacist iconography and mixes it with pop culture, co-opted the frog cartoon to appear with a Hitler-like mustache, wearing a skullcap or a Ku Klux Klan hood, the league said, adding that the images were used “in hateful messages aimed at Jewish and other users on Twitter.”

“Once again, racists and haters have taken a popular internet meme and twisted it for their own purposes of spreading bigotry and harassing users,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the league’s chief executive, said in the release.

The organization has a database of more than 150 symbols and images that it said represent bigotry or hate. The database, Hate on Display, was started in 2000 in an effort to track hate groups and help identify symbols that serve “as potential calling cards of extremists and anti-Semites,” the league said on its website.

In June, the organization added the “echo” symbol — three sets of parentheses before and after a name — to its database after members of the alt-right started using it to harass Jewish journalists and social media users. The symbol originated in 2014 on an anti-Semitic podcast, The Daily Shoah, which applied a novelty sound effect to Jewish names that made them echo ominously.

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