I watched the following BBC Storyville documentary
Pepe the Frog: Feels Good Man
A Storyville documentary. Pepe the Frog started life in 2005 as a cute cartoon character in an online comic. Today, he is known as an international hate symbol after being hijacked by the alt-right.
Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, used Pepe for a comic called, Boys Club.
Pepe was used by users of 4chan to create memes and when they felt like 'normies' were starting to infiltrate their 4chan space and use the Pepe memes, they started to make more and more controversial memes which the 'normies' wouldn't want to use.
This led to an increase of far right imagery including Pepe the Frog. The frog was used in memes including Trump and 4chan users started to help Trump in his race to the White House. Trump was known to retweet a meme giving more motivation to the users, however when Hilary Clinton posted about the worrying use of the frog memes, her post was ridiculed for seriously posting about the threat of a frog meme.
It was listed on the ADL (anti hate website listing hate symbols) as a hate symbol
Matt hadn't legally pushed copyright for Pepe so the use of the character continued. He has since tried to pull his ownership of the character back, using legal battles, making a peace hashtag to create positive images and also killing off Pepe the Frog at one point.
The Hong Kong umbrella movement used Pepe as their symbol of democracy and peace which gave the character some pull back, but it is said that the character had left the hands of Matt and would not be seen as a right wing character again because of the sheer amount of memes and interpretations of the frog.
Some memes were also sold as NFTs (non fungible token) and again shows how Pepe the frog exploded.
Matt has been able to take on a few court cases and win cases against for example, infowars
The idea that the meme wasn't copyrighted, or held to the copyright was very interesting for me in that the same happened to the am i a man not a brother image used by Wedgewood, this was said to help the slave trade as it was sued in many different ways, became a fashions statement and inspired the I AM A MAN posters of the 1960s.
These two images went in very different positive and negative directions from a similar spot of dissemination.
Was this to do with the technology available, is this the positive edited record that is held about Wedgewoods image and was there controversy around it?
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