For the past few days, an orange wave has been submerging Twitter’s homepage. On the profile photos of several hundred accounts, images with two-tone graphics in black and orange declined around several different designs. Here, a man with a gas mask. There, a boar. All the thumbnails look the same and a political message seems to be hiding behind. According to some, it would be “a faf rallying sign”.
Originally, the idea comes from an account named “Ast”. On June 18, the man who calls himself an “18-year-old graphic student, nationalist and revolutionary” offers: “If you have the time and the desire, go grab posters or visus on my Telegram channel and film yourself pasting them or make stencils out of it for me to put you in a video project for an upcoming project”. “My goal is to see the color orange as a fascist symbol”, he described from the first days on his Twitter account. Since then, his account has disappeared, very quickly overtaken by a backup account.
The movement is launched
On his Telegram channel “Ast graphism”, the political message is rather clear. For example, following the attack in Bordeaux on Monday June 19, the young man published a drawing of the attacker represented as a monster with a message. Other attacks are also mentioned, in particular that of Annecy a few days earlier. “Immigration is a mortal danger”, is it written above the drawing. In other images, the Celtic cross – which has become a symbol of far-right organizations – figures in turn. Weapons are also proliferating. “Fuck the system, print your weapons”, “A rifle, a homeland”.
On Twitter, most of the accounts using these vignettes advocate fascism and nationalism, others are also royalists. “Orange is the new white”, some even write in their biographies. Other mentions often come up, such as “national-autistic” or “national-nice”. Now, a large community has been created. Some even created their own logos, without waiting for help from the initiator of the movement.
Multiple symbols
For some Internet users, this is reminiscent of the trend of “Pepe the Frog”. The cartoon character has over time become the global rallying sign for the far right, first picked up by the alt-right and Donald Trump supporters in the United States, then by the far right in France . The goal ? Affirming one’s belonging, one’s thought and being one. “The character of Pepe the Frog did not originally have racist or anti-Semitic overtones. Internet users have appropriated the character and turned it into a meme, placing the frog in various circumstances and saying many different things, ”underlines the Anti-Defamation League, which also notes an increase in the use of these memes.
But the image of the frog was not the only one to be reused. The bacon and pig emojis have also become Islamophobic symbols, as has the milk emoji. Very innocuous in appearance, the latter is used by white supremacists in the United States to signal “that they tolerate lactose”. The goal is not to brag about digesting your yogurts well, but above all to show “its racial purity”. A hundred hate symbols are listed in all by the Anti-Defamation League.