(((Echoes))), Exposed: The Secret Symbol Neo-Nazis Use to Target Jews Online
Making America great again...
In the early days of the social web, putting someone's name in multiple parentheses was meant to give that person a cute virtual hug. Today, it's something far more sinister.
Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white nationalists have begun using three sets of parentheses encasing a Jewish surname — for instance, (((Fleishman))) — to identify and target Jews for harassment on blogs and major social media sites like Twitter. As one white supremacist tweeted, "It's closed captioning for the Jew-blind."
Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor for the New York Times, wrote about his experience as a victim of this harassment in a May 26 story.
"Hello ((Weisman))," it began after Weisman tweeted a Washington Post article about Donald Trump titled "This Is How Fascism Comes to America."
Weisman asked his harasser, @CyberTrump, to explain the symbol. "It's a dog whistle, fool," the user responded. "Belling the cat for my fellow goyim."
Read more: Inside the Google Chrome App White Supremacists Use to Secretly Track Jews and Anti-Whites
With the parentheses, @CyberTrump had alerted an army of trolls. The attacks that followed were sudden and unremitting. "The anti-Semitic hate, much of it from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn't stopped since," Weisman wrote.
The origins of the symbol ((())) can be traced to a hardcore, right-wing podcast called The Daily Shoah in 2014. It's known as an "echo" in the anti-Semitic corners of the alt-right — a new, young, amorphous conservative movement that comprises trolls fluent in internet culture, free speech activists warring against political correctness and earnest white nationalists. Some use the symbol to mock Jews; others seek to expose supposed Jewish collusion in controlling media or politics. All use it to put a target on their heads.
To the public, the symbol is not easily searchable on most sites and social networks; search engines strip punctuation from results. This means that trolls committed to uncovering, labeling and harassing Jewish users can do so in relative obscurity: No one can search those threats to find who's sending them.
The origin of (((echoes)))
The symbol comes from right-wing blog the Right Stuff, whose podcast The Daily Shoah featured a segment called "Merchant Minute" that gave Jewish names a cartoonish "echo" sound effect when uttered. The "parenthesis meme," as Right Stuff editors call it, is a visual pun.
In Right Stuff propaganda, you'll often read that Jewish names "echo." According to the blog's lexicon page, "all Jewish surnames echo throughout history." In other words, the supposed damage caused by Jewish people reverberates from decade to decade...
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