On Tuesday, the Clinton campaign published an article excoriating, not the viewpoints, the proposed policies or the occasionally inflammatory monologues of her principal opponent Donald Trump, but his campaign’s association with a cartoon frog.
The article was written in response to social media posts by Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone containing a modified poster of the movie “The Expendables.” In the picture, faces of prominent Trump supporters have been photoshopped over those of the characters of the film, and the title has been edited to read, “The Deplorables,” in reference to a statement by Clinton describing half of Trump’s supporters as belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” In particular, one of the faces edited into the picture is that of Internet sensation Pepe the Frog wearing a Donald Trump wig.
The Clinton campaign alleges that Pepe is a symbol with ties to white supremacy. While this itself is not entirely untrue, the article then goes on to cite a Daily Beast report in support of a claim that Pepe has recently “been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists.”
In a narrative supported by mainstream media, Pepe has evolved from a happy-go-lucky frog to a white nationalist Nazi figure. NBC, CNN and Vanity Fair all allude to the same Daily Beast article to back this statement. But taking a closer look at the article, the entirety of author Olivia Nuzzi’s argument lies in conversations she had with two self-proclaimed “white nationalists” on Twitter who claimed to have helped coordinate a scheme to re-appropriate Pepe as a symbol for white supremacy. Of course, this being the Internet, was it any surprise when the two people she interviewed were just trolls setting the bait?
Journalists are expected to dive deep into the story and try their hardest to uncover the truth. It’s often a difficult task, for example, if reporting about dangerous movements in a volatile setting like Syria. But when a journalist is reporting a story that requires no research beyond sitting in front of a computer and moving the mouse, it is simply inexcusable to deliver claims that are so absolutely incorrect.
Nuzzi failed to breach the surface of the Pepe phenomenon beyond consulting two essentially random people who happened to have Twitter accounts, and her inability to perform her journalistic duties has nontrivial ramifications, namely allowing Clinton and her supporters to build false evidence towards associating Trump with undesirable groups. The blame doesn’t rest entirely on her or the Daily Beast; larger media outlets that picked up the story have also blindly bit into the narrative to assemble the now-horrific Internet monster that is Pepe the frog.
To set the record straight, it’s true that Pepe has been used fairly extensively by fringe groups who have repurposed the meme to deliver racially charged or anti-Semitic messages. However, there was and is no movement to turn Pepe into an actual symbol of white supremacy. As an analogy, these groups also tend to use the American flag generously as a nationalistic emblem, but that doesn’t make the American flag a symbol of what they stand for. It’s the exceptional versatility of Pepe that allows its evolution towards whatever message the creator wants to communicate, which is why Pepe has been a stalwart of Internet culture for many years.
Looking at the big picture, the entire premise is somewhat comical, especially for those who have been following the progression of Pepe over the past decade. It's still a bit of a surprise to see an Internet meme become an issue in a national election. But as more and more people around the world are connected to the Internet, websites once hidden from mainstream traffic like 4chan have begun to become more accessible to the general public, and memes generated by these websites have permeated social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter. It's a phenomenon that is becoming more apparent: when the Cincinnati Zoo found out the hard way that asking people to stop spreading a meme only encourages people to do it more, the zoo deleted its social media accounts. As of the publishing date of this column, the zoo’s Twitter remains deactivated, and their other accounts are still peppered with comments about Harambe on a regular basis.
The Internet is growing, and its culture is becoming a larger part of Americans’ daily lives, so much so that it wouldn't seem unrealistic to imagine Internet culture and history as a standalone field of study in the subsequent decades. In the meantime, journalists reporting about the Internet and Internet phenomena should take more care in being critical and researching their topic to avoid spreading misinformation.
Junu Bae is a graduate student in the chemistry department. His column, “interested in everything,” runs on alternate Fridays.
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