๐ณ๐ฑ
I think 4chan is a shit hole and do not in any way approve of them mocking BLM or the movement.
The reason I share this however is to point out the generally harmful group think of people being activists right now, to the extent it is hurting the movement.
4chan consistently has success in these matters. Right now its Bald for BLM which seems to be catching on, and not that long ago they managed to trick everyone into thinking the OK hand gesture was a white supremacist hand gesture and even managed to get it on a list of hate speech.
When 4chan is this successful at manipulating people simply by making something look popular, when that is the only criteria for success, its time to reevaluate the underlying mentality driving our activism.
@freemo Side note, but the whole "๐" debacle is often represented in a way that doesn't quite reflect the reality accurately. The people who started the claim that it's a white supremacist thing were in part also white supremacists. I don't know what the exact proportions of just-for-the-lolz trolls to alt-righters were obviously, but there was enough of the latter, that I think this story can be described relatively accurately as "white supremacists adopting new symbol" rather than "trolls convincing journalists that white supremacists adopted a new symbol". I mean the trolls definitely thought they were doing that, so the truth is somewhere in between. And confusingly the white supremacists also thought they were trolling, as evidenced by the NZ mosque shooter -- he seemes to flash this symbol in some photos "ironically". But if you adopt a symbol "ironically" or "for-the-lulz" you still adopted the symbol...
@timorl I'm fine with saying that 4chan are white supremacists for the sake of argument.
But thats kinda the point. They never used it seriously to signal anything about them being white supremacist.
They saw a symbol that was so mind boggling common (something people use many times a day, literally everyone, akin to waving hello) and said "watch how we can manipulate them to absurd extrems.
Their intention was to take a gesture so common by convincing people it was a symbol of racism so people would start accusing ordinary innocent people of racism, specifically to cause non-racists to be antagonistic and hateful towards eachother, ot ensure people who are reasonable and going "guys this is a common hand gesture" are called racist and ultimately come to hate their fellow anti-racists.
The truth is there is a very very small handful of legitimate cases where white supremacists used it to signal racism. Virtually non-existent. Yet a bunch of white supremacists or trolls were able to manipulate a whole nation to act exactly the way they wanted. They were in control and they got the exact effect they wanted.
They never adopted the symbol, they only manipulated people into thinking they did, thats the key.
It says a lot more about the people they could manipulate to act exactly the way tehy intended than anything else.
