'OK' is now a hate symbol, the ADL says | Hacker News Reader

'OK' is now a hate symbol, the ADL says

cnn.com

12 pointstdewitt14 comments

There's a curiously large connection between 4Chan's audience and the far right if satirical memes are getting co-opted that easily. What an odd demographic they must have; both satire enthusiasts and their targets coexisting in one happy space...

When you create a community that's welcoming to racists, where people share racist ideology and memes and have racist conversations, with the plausible deniability provided by anonymity and the implied satire and irony behind everything, then actual racists will show up and speak openly, and appropriate the memes as actual symbols.

Why wouldn't they? It's free real estate, as it were.

This changes nothing for a lot of people. Divers, as others have mentioned in these comments as well as in construction/manufacturing (which has a large population of non-white people) it's used in situations where you cannot hear. I doubt anyone's going to convince these folks to change years of acceptable practice on the back of a hoax.

As for the ADL: feed a bear and they will happily take it. Ten minutes of research and they would have seen it's a troll.

Okaaay...

>The OK hand gesture and its link to white nationalism began as a hoax cooked up by users of the website 4chan, who falsely linked it to white supremacy, according to the ADL. It was meant to bait the media or people with liberal ideals to overreact, ADL experts say, and therefore look ridiculous for condemning such an innocuous sign.

This perfectly summarizes a frail old media trying to survive against a vibrant uncontrolled new media.

I think it summarizes the problem of 4chan. It doesn't say anywhere that the media tool the bait and the ADL has an old blog post making it clear that, at the time, it was a hoax. Now the ADL has reclassified it as an actual symbol of hate by alt-right groups and white supremacists.

I think the article paints a picture of the rise of hate groups and the appropriation of a commomly used and innocuous hand gesture. Hell, as a diver, I now have to think about the fact that some Bad Actors have taken what I use to indicate that I'm fine and turned it into "I support genocide."

Did you not get the memo? PADI is a hate organization now.

Ugh no please don't think about it! I'm a diver too and had a lovely time teaching my little blonde haired, blue eyed kids all the various hand signals, including this one.

So how about this still means "OK" if you're a normal person and you're not proudly flashing it at the end of a stiff arm in a crowd of skinheads?

Doesn't context count at all?

Edit: I'm not shouting at you, just generally in despair. Tone is more like, rolling my eyes with you. And I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

Because I'm selfish, diving was one of my first thoughts. "I use this all the time!" Context only counts for a time. My wife reminded men of one of her favorite childhood books that has "queer" in the title. It wasn't a slur, it was a synonym for "odd." Then came the 90s and later and "queer" was mostly used as a slur. Then to LGBTQ community took it as their own. It's nearly off limits for the rst of us because saying "how queer" has to be followed by "I mean odd, not a mean way to reference homosexuals." (Is that even the right way to reference people now? I can't track all the variants of binary/sis/etc.)

>This perfectly summarizes a frail old media trying to survive against a vibrant uncontrolled new media.

You seem to have this idea of "old" media being a bunch of out of touch old people typing on typewriters and using rotary phones, and "new" media being hip punk kids sticking it to the man with their dank memes and irony, but this is a myth. They're the same thing now. Old media transitioned into the new media landscape years ago, the web and sites like 4chan haven't been something only young people understand for a long time (if that was ever the case) and new media is controlled by many of the same old media interests.

The distinction is about business models and cost of doing business. When your costs are high and you are owned by a mega corp, there is a high probability that some of your stories are compromised. This is pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention and has been since at least Bush 2 and probably earlier.

That's a distinction between corporate new media and independent new media, not new and old.

And plenty of independent new media has been compromised by political and ideological interests.

Plenty of old media too.

Yeah, they're all the same thing in many ways now. The internet is as mainstream as any other communications platform, decades old, but people still pretend like no one older than 20 gets it.

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