ADL Joins With “Pepe” Creator Matt Furie in Social Media Campaign to #SavePepe

6.1.17

ADL Joins With “Pepe” Creator Matt Furie in Social Media Campaign to #SavePepe: New York, NY, October 14, 2016 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is joining forces with the artist who created “Pepe the Frog” in an effort to take back the popular internet meme from racists and use the frog’s likeness as a force for good.

Pepe artist Matt Furie reached out to ADL after a proliferation of hateful Pepe memes appeared on the internet and social media, prompting ADL to designate the frog as a calling card of racists in its online database of visual hate symbols. White supremacists and other haters had co-opted Pepe by creating a series of anti-Semitic and racist images of the cartoon amphibian in Klan or Nazi regalia, or depicting him as a stereotypical Jew.

“Pepe was never intended to be used as a symbol of hate,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “The sad frog was meant to be just that, a sad frog. We are going to work with Matt and his community of artists reclaim Pepe so that he might be used as a force for good, or at the very least to help educate people about the dangers of prejudice and bigotry.”