For those of you who don’t know, Pepe the frog is a popular meme that, according to Know Your Meme, has been circulating the internet since 2005, first appearing in the comic Boy’s Club by Matt Furie. Since then, many versions of him have appeared, such as Smug Pepe, Angry Pepe, and Rare Pepe. However, some more concerning Pepe edits have been making their rounds on the internet lately. They actually caught the attention of the Anti-Defamation League, a group founded in 1913 that is dedicated to fighting the defamation of Jewish people.

On September 27th of 2016, Pepe was added to ADL’s Online Hate Symbols database. Although our favorite green frog didn’t originally have antisemitic connotations, a small portion of the memes have been edited to promote antisemitic attitudes. These unsettling iterations of the original meme depict Pepe as Hitler, or wearing a Klan hood. There is a short Pepe comic suggesting that Jewish people orchestrated 9/11. And, finally, a Pepe that instructs the viewer to “kill Jews, man.”

The internet was not happy with ADL’s announcement, and have taken to Twitter to voice their opinions. And by opinions, I mean even more antisemitic Pepe memes, and just hateful comments in general. However, there seemed to be a misunderstanding between all these enraged Pepe fans and ADL. This is probably because most of them neglected to read the actual article ADL published about Pepe, which ends with this important detail:

“However, because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature, it is important to examine use of the meme only in context. The mere fact of posting a Pepe meme does not mean that someone is racist or white supremacist.”

In short, ADL is not trying to scrub the internet clean of the sad frog, but merely drawing attention to the small, but reportedly growing, numberof white supremacists and racists that are using it. Let's be honest. Although we brush off memes as some dumb, popular pictures we see scrolling through our Facebook feeds, they are powerful. Almost everyone sees them at some point, and we use them to interact with each other online. To you, a racist Pepe meme might be funny, but to someone else, it is a tool that reinforces certain attitudes about them, and influences how they are treated.

Please meme responsibly.