Earlier this year Fitbit, the wearable tech company, faced a surprising communication conundrum related to Pepe the Frog.
Pepe is a cartoon character that became a popular internet meme and was fairly innocuous until alt-right hate groups started using him to promote racist extremism, causing the Anti-Defamation League to designate Pepe as a hate symbol.
The problem? Fitbit had recently switched its employee online chat platform from Hipchat to Slack, and Slack allows people to create custom memes and emojis, said J.D. Norton, then-director of internal communications at San Francisco-based Fitbit. “So we had to have a Pepe the Frog meeting with HR about whether to ban the use of frog emojis in all communications.”
