4 chan started a prank saying that the ok sign was actually spelling out “WP” meaning “white power”.
The ADL and a bunch of news agencies bought it hook, line, and sinker. Pretty quickly scuba divers, anyone who has been a teenage boy in the past few decades, and really just anyone with a pulse and a brain cell pointed out how ridiculous it would be to believe that.
Some of the groups that got tricked (the ADL most notably) doubled down instead of admitting that they got got. They found like one fringe neo-nazi group that started doing it (probably after seeing it on 4 chan) and insisted “SeE? RaCiSt Dog whistle!”.
There’s nothing wrong with the “OK” sign. It’s perfectly innocent.
That’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. They only use it because CNN and the ADL wouldn’t backtrack, thus giving their claims validity after the fact.
We, the public, can stop that bullshit in it’s tracks by rejecting the whole premise and insisting on the actual, innocent meaning of the gesture.
That’s like complaining that 12 year-olds drive language evolution. Yeah its obviously stupid to anyone who follows the process, but it’s still the process.
So a white supremacists website created a dog whistle, and now those same white supremacists use it regularly? That doesn’t sound perfectly innocent, especially not when PJW is the one flashing it and making sure we all know there’s a far-right connotation.
I used to believe the “shitpost that got out of hand” excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:
I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.
It also happened to take place on International Women’s Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.
Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.
Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the “media fell for a 4chan prank” story for plausible deniability.
So the “white gamer bros in Dallas, Texas” had no overlap with 4 chan users who realized they were in front of cameras and could do some trolling IRL?
I had heard that “white gamer bros” were few and far between on 4 chan, and certainly weren’t the sort to start or support any of the trolling the site was notorious for. /S
Why exactly are we giving Nazis the power to poison language, emojis, what have you for the rest of us again?
I think we should do the opposite. As soon as some symbol becomes a dog whistle, we should all rush to use it for it’s original meaning as much as possible, thus preventing the dog from hearing the whistle where it’s supposed to be used as such.
Well the purpose of the hate list like this isn’t “what symbols not to use” so much as, if a guy uses this and there’s context to suggest it’s a dogwhistle, this is what it means.
As a concrete example, If someone turns to a camera makes the ok gesture then punches a black guy that can be used as evidence in conjunction with a database like this to add a hate crime charge onto the assault charge.
Exactly this. Gasden Flag, same vibes, same weird arguments from people trying to take it back. Go ahead and try, I wish you well, but you’re gonna look like a racist flying it.
No. This was in the context of the original comment. If somebody has no idea what’s wrong with the ok sign, they probably don’t need to worry about it. This is all terminally online insanity.
Because when someone uses a symbol while they do something shitty, they are associating that symbol with their shitty behaviors. Human brains are wired to identify paterns and associations for threat identification. That’s why cops all dress differently than EMT’s.
If your ex-girlfriend left you in a nasty break up, you might avoid her favorite restaurant, cry when you hear her favorite songs, or even get upset just seeing a similar car to the one she drove. You cant drown out a dog whistel, all you can do is point it out.
They tried that in Reddit back in 2019, and it failed. Frenworld tried taking rainbow flags to mean “A seperate place for every race” ahortly before they got banned.
Once a symbol has stuck, you cant shift it no matter how hard you try.
Tbf the fact that it failed kinda proves his point, and the fact that the ok symbol is “now a nazi dogwhistle” (or, like, that whole “swastika” thing) disproves your second point.
Can’t tell if you’re saying the hindus/other cultures had used the swastika for years and so that’s why the nazis were able to steal it (which would seem to be applicable to the pride flag as well, also an established symbol,) or that the nazis were able to adopt the OK symbol because it wasn’t well established as a symbol for one group, but rather a general signal for “Ok” since like wwii.
In any case, I doubt it, if that were the reason why wouldn’t they have been successful in taking the swastika but not the pride flag, both established symbols? Much more likely that it didn’t work “because we didn’t let it” which kinda seems to be his entire point imo.
No, symbols are just hard to change. Once they have a meaning associated to them, you can’t take the meaning away. A pride flag is symbol, so ot means something. An ok hand gesture doesn’t have much beyond “ok” to it, so it can quickly be taken over and poisoned.
A drop of poison in a glass will kill you, but a drop in an lake won’t harm anyone.
That’s fine, detach from the flag and pick something else. It’s the act of repulsion I’m clarifying. If a group chooses, a poisoner has no power, they are discarded.
“Ok” meant “ok” for many years. Society allowed it to be poisoned and that is lame.
That’s why the ok sign is still “in most contexts is entirely innocuous and harmless”, even according to the ADL. Because it had, you know, a meaning associated to it …
Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, told NPR that for years on fringe online message boards such as 4chan and 8chan, the “OK” sign has been deployed in memes and other images promoting hate. Given the number of white supremacists who have adopted it, he said it can now carry a nefarious message.
What’s wrong with the OK sign?
4 chan started a prank saying that the ok sign was actually spelling out “WP” meaning “white power”.
The ADL and a bunch of news agencies bought it hook, line, and sinker. Pretty quickly scuba divers, anyone who has been a teenage boy in the past few decades, and really just anyone with a pulse and a brain cell pointed out how ridiculous it would be to believe that.
Some of the groups that got tricked (the ADL most notably) doubled down instead of admitting that they got got. They found like one fringe neo-nazi group that started doing it (probably after seeing it on 4 chan) and insisted “SeE? RaCiSt Dog whistle!”.
There’s nothing wrong with the “OK” sign. It’s perfectly innocent.
It started as a prank, but now fascists unironically use the ok sign.
It’s a dog whistle. They use something innocent to signal to others in their ingroup, and call people stupid when they call them out on it.
That’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. They only use it because CNN and the ADL wouldn’t backtrack, thus giving their claims validity after the fact.
We, the public, can stop that bullshit in it’s tracks by rejecting the whole premise and insisting on the actual, innocent meaning of the gesture.
That’s like complaining that 12 year-olds drive language evolution. Yeah its obviously stupid to anyone who follows the process, but it’s still the process.
Enough is enough. Letting neo Nazis dictate how we behave gives them power. I, for one, refuse to do that.
So a white supremacists website created a dog whistle, and now those same white supremacists use it regularly? That doesn’t sound perfectly innocent, especially not when PJW is the one flashing it and making sure we all know there’s a far-right connotation.
So we’re just going to let one fringe group ruin a decades old gesture? We’re going to give crackpots that kind of power?
Fuck that.
The power they have comes in the form of folks like you defending the dog whistle as innocent while they use it as a virtue signal for hate.
Yes, my insistence on ignoring the fringe racist group really gives them a lot of attention. /S
You think that White Supremacy is a fringe movement that can be defeated through inaction?
Read a fucking book one day…
I used to believe the “shitpost that got out of hand” excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:
I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.
It also happened to take place on International Women’s Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.
Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.
Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the “media fell for a 4chan prank” story for plausible deniability.
So the “white gamer bros in Dallas, Texas” had no overlap with 4 chan users who realized they were in front of cameras and could do some trolling IRL?
I had heard that “white gamer bros” were few and far between on 4 chan, and certainly weren’t the sort to start or support any of the trolling the site was notorious for. /S
A bunch of nazi’s used it as a dog whistle and it got added to a database of hate symbols.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49837898
Why exactly are we giving Nazis the power to poison language, emojis, what have you for the rest of us again?
I think we should do the opposite. As soon as some symbol becomes a dog whistle, we should all rush to use it for it’s original meaning as much as possible, thus preventing the dog from hearing the whistle where it’s supposed to be used as such.
Well the purpose of the hate list like this isn’t “what symbols not to use” so much as, if a guy uses this and there’s context to suggest it’s a dogwhistle, this is what it means.
As a concrete example, If someone turns to a camera makes the ok gesture then punches a black guy that can be used as evidence in conjunction with a database like this to add a hate crime charge onto the assault charge.
Exactly this. Gasden Flag, same vibes, same weird arguments from people trying to take it back. Go ahead and try, I wish you well, but you’re gonna look like a racist flying it.
Probably the same reason that the swastika is a hate symbol instead of a Hindu symbol.
By that point, it’s already been tainted and it’s too hard to tell reality from satire from ignorance.
Nazis just love appropriating and poisoning symbols, and it all started with the swastika: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
In any normal circles, nazis are so irrelevant that you dont need to worry about ok signs or whatnot
First day on the Internet?
No. This was in the context of the original comment. If somebody has no idea what’s wrong with the ok sign, they probably don’t need to worry about it. This is all terminally online insanity.
Because when someone uses a symbol while they do something shitty, they are associating that symbol with their shitty behaviors. Human brains are wired to identify paterns and associations for threat identification. That’s why cops all dress differently than EMT’s.
If your ex-girlfriend left you in a nasty break up, you might avoid her favorite restaurant, cry when you hear her favorite songs, or even get upset just seeing a similar car to the one she drove. You cant drown out a dog whistel, all you can do is point it out.
Right but if Nazis just started using the LGBTQ+ flag, that wouldn’t be recognized.
They tried that in Reddit back in 2019, and it failed. Frenworld tried taking rainbow flags to mean “A seperate place for every race” ahortly before they got banned.
Once a symbol has stuck, you cant shift it no matter how hard you try.
Tbf the fact that it failed kinda proves his point, and the fact that the ok symbol is “now a nazi dogwhistle” (or, like, that whole “swastika” thing) disproves your second point.
There was already a large, active movement that had adopted the symbol. None such movement existed for the “OK” hand gesture.
Can’t tell if you’re saying the hindus/other cultures had used the swastika for years and so that’s why the nazis were able to steal it (which would seem to be applicable to the pride flag as well, also an established symbol,) or that the nazis were able to adopt the OK symbol because it wasn’t well established as a symbol for one group, but rather a general signal for “Ok” since like wwii.
In any case, I doubt it, if that were the reason why wouldn’t they have been successful in taking the swastika but not the pride flag, both established symbols? Much more likely that it didn’t work “because we didn’t let it” which kinda seems to be his entire point imo.
It was a hypothetical. Pick anything you want.
And anyways you proved my point, the “society” pushed back, ad discarded it, rather than allow it to be poisoned.
No, symbols are just hard to change. Once they have a meaning associated to them, you can’t take the meaning away. A pride flag is symbol, so ot means something. An ok hand gesture doesn’t have much beyond “ok” to it, so it can quickly be taken over and poisoned.
A drop of poison in a glass will kill you, but a drop in an lake won’t harm anyone.
That’s fine, detach from the flag and pick something else. It’s the act of repulsion I’m clarifying. If a group chooses, a poisoner has no power, they are discarded.
“Ok” meant “ok” for many years. Society allowed it to be poisoned and that is lame.
That’s why the ok sign is still “in most contexts is entirely innocuous and harmless”, even according to the ADL. Because it had, you know, a meaning associated to it …
Ah. The Pepe Frog Phenomenon.
This might give some info.