Pepe

Pepe the Frog.

Pepe the Frog, also known by a few as the Grinch, is a fictional character best known for having a vaguely-stilted neutral pose, which can be interpreted as a wide spectrum of emotions. This is similar to Doge, Wojak or the Mona Lisa (unironically). Pepe's nonspecific emotion makes him suitable as a generic reaction image and as the mandatory thread-starting image that is required by most imageboards, giving rise to the phrase "What does the reddit frog have to do with this".

Pepe came from some webcomic nobody gives a shit about.

Frogposters

great thread man, can't wait to see where this one takes us

Frogposters are a group of 4chan users who routinely post Pepe to the point of obsession. They are commonly accused of making low-qualityor nonsensical posts, and are often criticized for being whiny. Their ultimate motive is unknown, but we hope it is benevolent.

Relationship with Soyposters

Frogposters and 'jakkers have traditionally expressed solidarity as they are both 4chan outcasts.

Due to the fact that Pepe is such a broad image with little expectation of being related to the post material, Soyteens sometimes make soy-related posts on /bant/ using Pepe in order to survive deletion by janny because, like Cirno, jannies do not consider Pepe spam. This development has been criticised by frogposters.

On January 8th, 2022, a frogposter on /g/ admitted to reporting The Party for CP (which he totally didn't post himself) and successfully getting it taken down. Soot later corroborated his story, confirming it to be true. This almost broke the long-lasting detente between the two groups, particularly as some frogposters seemed to celebrate it as a "total frogposter victory". Since then, the relations have been very tense. With some forgiving them, and others totally distrusting them and calling him by the nickname of Redditfrog.

Steganography datamining strips

They appear below the pupils.

An easily-missed feature of every Pepe is the pair of identifying lines below the right eye. It is highly improbable that these strips are mere compression artifacts as they have been stamped on every instance of the most common Pepe in the exact same manner, and there is seemingly no reason for a compression algorithm to do this; besides, the strips exist even on image formats that don't use compression. The strips are likely a steganographic technique to embed hidden data within every Pepe. It is unknown what data is embedded on the Pepes, but it is likely a means to track the spread and evolution of the wider Pepe meme.

Compromised Pepes

The steganography strips appear solely but uniformly on the most common Pepe variety on the internet, the 976x850. This is the variety featured at the top of this article. The 976x850 originates from a 2016 news article by the BBC, for which it owes its potency—such coverage by such a large news organisation has made the image the first result for "pepe the frog" and the second result for "pepe" on Google images; the first result (the 780x438 "pepefroggie.jpg" from KYM) does not have the strips; however, this variant is used much less frequently likely due to its uncomfortable rectangular proportions, especially when compared to the squarish British Broadcasting Corporation image which is much more suited for forum posts.

Involvement by the British state & Ultimate purpose

Along with Wojaks, Pepe and its variations are by far the most popular images posted on 4chan, with tens of thousands exchanged every year. The only organisations capable of sifting through whatever data provided by the steganography built into every Pepe are that on the scale of world governments. Considering the common source of all steganographically-compromised Pepe images is the British Broadcasting Corporation, it is likely that the British state is behind this operation. This points to the conclusion that the steganography strips are a British covert intelligence operation to moniter the spread and evolution of Pepe as a meme—this, in turn, ultimately suggests involvement by Richard Dawkins, a high-ranking British officer within the "Science Sate", who proposed the theory of memes and how they spread in his book The Selfish Gene (1976).

Possible artificial popularity of Pepe

"Pepe the frog" in blue; "Pepe the frog meme" in red. Both reached their all-time peaks in September 2016, the same month that the "most common Pepe" entered circulation. Note: This data comes from Google, who may have obfuscated the numbers to hide the truth.

Steganographically-compromised Pepes first began to spread on September 28th, 2016, when the British Broadcasting Corporation posted their article featuring the first stripped Pepe. This was around the time when interest in Pepe was at the highest point it had ever been and has ever been since, mostly down to the meme becoming an issue in the US Presidental Election following a Twitter post by Donald Trump, which was subsequently matched by the ADL branding Pepe a hate symbol. This string of high-profile political controversies featuring Pepe may have been an artificial campaign to prepare the ground for the coming steganographic datamining operation. This also coincides with the 4chan concept of /pol/ "election tourists", which itself hints at even greater astroturfing.

Possible CIA involvement

It is probable that the British state was aided in this operation by the CIA and other Five Eyes intelligence organisations, especially considering the role played by the US Presidential Election; however, this cannot be decisively confirmed.

In conclusion, don't download the BBC pepe.

Criticism

On September 12th, 2016, the femoid Benghazi Butcher Hillary Clinton released a blogpost in which she criticised Pepe for being "sinister".