that the Anti-Defamation League declared it a hate symbol. By 2016 Pepe the Frog had gained such widespread use among white supremacists in the U.S. The meme began life as an innocent cartoon amphibian, but as it grew in popularity, users of the online message boards 4chan, 8chan and Reddit began making anti-Semitic and racist versions of it. Pepe the Frog exemplifies the capacity of memes to both foment hate and defy oppression. “As they get more esoteric, as they get more inside jokey, then there’s more and more of a signal that ‘if you get this, if you’re part of the joke-then you are one of us,’” Milner says, “and ‘if you don’t get it., then you’re not one of us.” And their power to spread rapidly online derives from their ability to establish an in-group and out-group. But he notes that visual symbols have proved particularly effective at evading censorship, thanks to their inherent ambiguity. The specific form of a symbol ultimately matters less than the idea it represents, says Ryan Milner, who studies Internet culture at the College of Charleston. On the Internet, such symbols can manifest as words or visual motifs, including emoji, memes or other images. Analogously, online coded symbols evolve as their previously secret meanings become well-known. In this way, femme (the standard word for “woman”) gave rise to meuf, which in turn became feumeu.
Because many verlan terms originated as a secret code to discuss illicit behavior, the process was often repeated when a new form became too recognizable.
Herring says the cycle of code making and code breaking “is a major driver of language change.” In French, for instance, slang words known as verlan are created by transposing the syllables of an existing word. When homosexuality was illegal in the 20th-century U.K., members of the gay subculture used a secret slang called Polari. In the antebellum U.S., Harriet Tubman communicated with fugitives escaping slavery by singing songs with hidden meanings that their pursuers would not understand. The use of symbolism to avoid censorship is as old as language itself. Credit: Sylvia Buchholz and Elijah Nouvelage Alamy The people are constantly coming up with creative new symbols.” Woman wears a helmet adorned with an image of Pepe the Frog that she hand-painted and a Trump/Pence sticker at a rally organized by the right-wing group Patriot Prayer in Vancouver, Wash., on September 10, 2017. “But eventually caught up with that, and they banned that, too,” says Susan Herring, a linguist at Indiana University Bloomington who studies technology-mediated communication. In the early days of Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo, users sidestepped the ban by referring to “May 35” instead. These strategies can be used to spread abuse-or to preserve freedom of expression.Ĭhina’s government, for instance, prohibits social media posts referencing June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown that killed an unknown number of Chinese pro-democracy protesters and their sympathizers. Scholars who study social media discourse say this incident reflects a broader phenomenon: Whenever online authorities (whether social media platforms or governments) attempt to restrict speech on the Internet, people will find creative ways to subvert the rules.
But even as Twitter attempted to enforce its rules more stringently, thinly veiled posts slipped through the cracks.īy referencing schadenfreude, karma or the old adage “you reap what you sow” in reference to Trump’s illness, many Twitter users avoided explicitly violating the site’s abuse policy while leaving no doubt as to their intended sentiment. On the same day that President Donald Trump announced his COVID-19 diagnosis, Twitter reminded users of its policy that “tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against *anyone* are not allowed and will need to be removed.” The social media platform soon filled with posts accusing it of hypocrisy: threats targeting women and people of color have accumulated for years without removal, users said.