It’s one of the most annoying viral sensations to grace you news feed since Kylie Jenner.
Trash Dove has multiplied just like the pigeon pests it portrays, plaguing every comment section from here to kingdom come.
But the only thing more bizarre than Trash Dove itself is the conspiracy theories surrounding the bird’s wildly swinging head.
Trash Doves began their lives as Facebook stickers designed by Florida artist, Syd Weller, to help us all express our emotions through the medium of a purple pigeon stuck in a donut.
The people of Thailand loved Trash Dove, and the sticker pack soon became a global sensation.
But rather than recognise the stickers as shallow, mindless entertainment, some people have decided to use Trash Dove as a vessel for their alt-politics.
As with most dark political plots, it all started on 4Chan when reams of pallid Twitter trolls with Neo-Nazi ideologies decided to appropriate Trash Dove for their own evil means.
In a plot to mess with online liberal commentators, trolls have been moulding Trash Dove’s image into Nazi symbolism, dying the eagle emblem of Nazi Germany purple and combining it with Pepe…
You know, to make it their own.
The trolls have been playing with Trash Dove to freak out anti-Fascists in the most playground tactics we’ve seen since conkers were allowed on school grounds.
In doing so, however – in the name of online banter – Neo-Nazis have actually shared Trash Dove so many times they managed to appropriate the purple pigeon and turn it into a symbol of fascism.
Of course, some liberals have responded by encouraging people to stop using Trash Dove, for fear of spreading white supremacy. Groups have even threatened to block users if they spread the ‘white nationalist’ symbol.
This is the lowest, lamest, saddest example of a simple Facebook sticker being used as a symbol in a futile online culture war.
With the alt-right 4Chan white supremacist trolls constantly agitating and antagonising, it seems nothing – not even humanity’s universal hatred of Trash Dove – is pure and sacred and free from the shackles of politics anymore.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.