Et Tu, Pepe?

Longtitudinal Attitudes Towards the Pepe the Frog Internet Meme During
the 2016 Presidential Election
By Jeff Grips
Self-Appointed Poet Laureate of Left-Joke Twitter
Abstract
Two surveys were conducted on the once-popular web platform Twitter three months
apart during the 2016 Presidential election. The differences between these poll results
point to the changing attitudes towards Pepe the Frog as the Trump and Clinton
campaigns respectively branded him as closer or farther from their camps. This serves
to show that internet memes, typically thought of as an artform sui generis, do not exist
in a vacuum; rather, attitudes towards memes are heavily informed by what others may
call the mass media's manufacturing of opinion. Furthermore, we can posit the
existence of anti-fascists that may be best known as shitposters who offer a liberatory
alternative to more reactionary subclassifications of webposters.

Background
Pepe the Frog is a meme used here in the same sense that we now regard the coiner
of the neologism, Richard Dawkins, as a joke - that has existed for nearly a decade,
first marked by its appearance in the excellent Boy's Club comic by Matt Furie. A panel
in which Pepe said feels good man, and edits such as the obvious feels bad man,
became a common reaction image on fast-paced, influential websites such as 4chan.

Figure 1. A common Pepe.

Variations of the Pepe meme remained in frequent circulation on 4chan image boards
over the years, often accompanied by or serving as a foil to the Wojack/Feels guy
meme. In 2015, the Pepe meme experienced an upswing in popularity as teens outside

of 4chan's immediate sphere of influence began to trade and collect rare Pepes, their
term for specially designed or unique images featuring Pepe.

Figure 2. Google Trends analytics shows the relative frequency of google searches for
Pepe the frog (blue) and rare pepe (red) over the past five years. Note the significant
increase in searches for both terms in mid-2015, the steady decline of searches for
rare pepe, and the explosive increase of general Pepe the frog searches in midSeptember 2016.
The upswing in Pepe's popularity coincided with protracted mass media focus on the
2016 Presidential campaign. Donald J. Trump, the major party candidate with whom the
Pepe phenomenon has most strongly been associated, announced his candidacy on
June 16, 2015. This election has also seen an increased focus on social media as a
campaign tool: Hillary Rodham Clinton, the nominee for the Democratic Party,
announced her candidacy on April 12, 2015, via YouTube video.
On September 13, 2016, an article appeared on hillaryclinton.com entitled "Donald
Trump, Pepe the frog, and white supremacists: an explainer." The short article, written
by Clinton campaign strategist Elizabeth Chan, identified Pepe as a symbol "associated
with white supremacy." Chan's article included a screen capture of the October 13, 2015
tweet where Trump himself shared an image of Pepe edited to resemble a prospective
President Trump. "In recent months, Pepe's been almost entirely co-opted by the white
supremacists who call themselves the 'alt-right,'" Chan wrote, referring to the segment
of Trump supporters who are commonly identified as meme-literate younger racists;
basically, wannabe neo-nazi nerds who like anime. The alt-right was also the subject of
a condemnatory speech by Clinton on August 25, 2016, a major development in her
campaign's strategy of highlighting Trump's unsavory supporters that has since
culminated in her controversial "basket of deplorables" comment. This high-profile
explanation led to an explosion of interest in the Pepe meme by mainstream audiences,
or "normies" (see Fig. 2).
Hypothesis
As the Pepe meme becomes increasingly associated with the white supremacist Trump
campaign, an increasing number of poll respondents will identify Pepe as a meme
closest affiliated with Nazis. However, the countervailing balance of meme-loving fucks
will seek to appropriate Pepe for their own ends, leading to efforts to recuperate Pepe

as an identifying marker of shitposters. This will most likely be seen by having fewer
respondents associate Pepe with the nebulous, but ultimately neutral teens subset.

Method
To determine the attitude of savvy internet users, the researcher utilized Twitter's polls
function to survey the opinions of their followers. The @erasmuslijn account, over the
past five years, has collected a decent following of discriminating individuals with a taste
for meme culture, correct left-wing politics, and the like. @erasmuslijn could always use
more followers. No fuckboys, please. The experimental procedure was simple enough
to implement, so the researcher was probably drunk and/or high when they put it
together. Sorry. By freak coincidence, the researcher remembered to repeat the poll
exactly three months after its initial date, thus giving birth to the longitudinal survey
format.

Results

Fig 3. The June 14, 2016 poll. 8 shitposters, 11 teenagers, 10 nazis.

Fig. 4. The September 14, 2016 poll. 67 shitposters, 29 teenagers, 41 nazis.

The June 14 poll had a sample size of 29 respondents out of a following population of
roughly 2000. This represents a hilarious margin of error of 18.07%.
The September 14 poll had 137 respondents out of a following population of roughly
2100. A confidence level of 95% is attained with a slightly more respectable confidence
interval of 8.1%.
Conclusions
The experimental procedure, Make a poll when you're drunk and/or high, then issue the
same poll three months later, has its strengths and weaknesses. For strengths, it
produced a fair number of Twitter interactions, and that's what's good about the bad
site. Describing the weaknesses of this approach is beyond the scope of this paper.
The most significant result is that the neutral teen category did drastically diminish
over time, suggesting that the hypothesis about the polarization of the Pepe meme was
correct.
One must account for the likelihood that there were more self-identified shitposters
reponding to the polls than there were self-identified nazis and self-identified teens.
The identification of shitposters as a group not only separate, but against nazis, is
telling. Though initially a simple categorization designed on a whim, the adaptation of
the category by apparent self-identified shitposters who responded to the poll suggests
a degree of merit in the categorization as something that stood separate and even
opposed to nazis. This appears to confirm the thesis was put forward in the article

"Shitposting is Communism" by Zoe Sackman. If one wants to fight for whats good in
this world, it seems, shitposting is an essential weapon in the antifascist arsenal.
Though we find the results to be significant, it is recommended that this experiment be
repeated by researchers with greater access to funding and the capacity to know the
particular demographics of the surveyed population. This way, they would ensure
greater parity among the number of respondents who fit the shitposter/teen/nazi
classification system, and properly weigh the survey pool by collecting opinions of
confirmed normies.

Figure 5. A rare recuperated Pepe.