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Comment by mtgp1000 | Hacker News Reader

>Likely unbeknownst to most Americans, the alt-right has appropriated a version of the “okay” symbol for their own purposes because it looks like the initials for “white power”; this is the symbol the man accused Cafferty of making when his hand was dangling out of his truck.

I am so tired of watching journalists repeat this irresponsible lie. The "white power" symbol was the result of a spontaneous flashmob campaign to prove that journalists will pick up and run with any ridiculous "trend" that fills their demand for racism. I challenge anyone to find a legitimate link explaining the relationship between the symbol and white supremacy that doesn't ultimately lead to a journal article sourced from cherry picked Twitter threads.

Journalism died when ideologues normalized activist journalism. We are in the midst of a mass hysteria and media outlets are fully culpable. 70 years ago we called it McCarthyism.

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>The "white power" symbol was the result of a spontaneous flashmob campaign to prove that journalists will pick up and run with any ridiculous "trend" that fills their demand for racism.

If I understand you correctly, it sounds like the media took the bait?

The media knew well it was a fake, but anything these days that can polarize people more ("You won't believe the secret symbol the alt-right uses! Click here to learn about it") it's a gold mine for them.

Unfortunately, the type of people who think it's a good idea to go around trying to invent racist symbols to try and prove that the media is fake news also happen to be the people who are coincidentally holidaying in Charlottesville in August if you know what I mean.

You're stereotyping. There was a time when we agreed it was wrong to do.

There's actually quite an important difference between making an assumption about a group of people who choose to associate and those that are a group because of an imutable characterisitic. Making assumptions about black people? Probably a bad idea, because that doesn't define who they are. Making an assumption about people who hang out with that loud racist guy? Probably fair - since they're making a choice, and that choice tells us about their charateristic, which brings us back to it not being a stereotype, it's an observation. People who hang out with wildly unhigned racists spreading conspiracy theories, are in fact, probably wildly unhinged racists.

The funny thing is that the OK symbol actually became a "white power" (whether ironic or serious) symbol just because of the media.

It is absurd how far this the ok symbol story has gone from 4chan.

It's also objectively wrong. It wasn't a '4chan hoax', people had been using the OK symbol as a link to Trump long before they made claims of making it all up. The fact that much of the media took the 'it was all a psyop' seriously is embarrassing.

This was around the same time they also tried to take credit for the Steele dossier, claiming they had made it all up and what not. In either case, when people started ironically using it to troll, others started using it unironically as a dogwhistle.

The Anti-Defamation League (a group that tracks hate groups) disagrees.

https://www.adl.org/blog/how-the-ok-symbol-became-a-popular-...

They attribute it to 4chan.

Yes, and the ADL is wrong.

There are multiple photo examples of white supremacists in 2015 and 2016 using the OK symbol as a link to Trump. Milo Yiannopoulos was one of them and Pepe was often shown using the OK symbol during any support of Trump. The reality is that the white supremacist supporters of Trump were already using that symbol to designate their support for him.

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