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Comment by 5trokerac3 | Hacker News Reader

> "PewDiePie fans"

More like trolls piggybacking off PewDiePie as a meme.

Is the assertion that they don't actually support or watch PewDiePie? Or that they do so ironically? How can we even begin to make these distinctions without a god's-eye-view of all these people and all this fans and all their intentions?

"PewDiePie fans keep making junk ransomware" is a different headline than "Virus encrypts hard drive until PewDiePie reaches 100M followers"

The former, for people who only read headlines, implies PewDiePie is at fault, or at least condones ransomware in his name. It's the same (purposefully?) ignorant reading of "chan culture" as the implication that every Pepe meme is Nazi propaganda.

A very large percentage Pepe memes are white supremacist propaganda or just blatantly racist. They took something that was decent and ruined it. I mean it's like claiming Charlie Daniels isn't conservative despite most of what he says being conservative and on conservative networks. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

Source:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pepe+meme&ia=images&iax=images

This argument is entirely disingenuous. For at least a decade, Pepe memes were wholly generic. People all across the spectrum used them.

In the last three years, a (dis?)information campaign to align Pepe memes with the alt-right resulted in a massive drop in use of the meme by non-alt-right people, who didn't want to be considered guilty by proxy. You're using the after-effect of the association as proof of origin.

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