ECHO

The “echo” or “triple brackets" is an anti-semetic hate symbol. It consists of a series of three parentheses that are placed around names or images of people to indicate that they are Jewish. The symbol originated from the podcast The Daily Shoah run by the hardcore right-wing blog The Right Stuff. The purpose of the echo is to identify and target Jews and “anti-whites” for harassment online. Once targeted, these individuals often recieve death threats or anti-Semitic messages. The echo is also intended to “bring attention to the omnipotence of Jewish people within different media organizations, arming the conspiracy theory of the cultural hegemony of Jewish people.” ¹

Like the yellow star used by Nazis to identify Jewish people, the echo serves as an indicator to visually demarcate difference and identify the perceived “enemy.” However, the insidiousness of the echo brackets comes from its coded meaning. “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.” ²

In 2016, a group called altrightmedia uploaded a Chrome browser extension named “Coincidence Detector,” which compiled a user-generated list of Jewish names and encased those names in the echo brackets. (The word “coincidence” is itself coded language used by the alt-right to mean “Jewish conspiracy”). The app gained 2,473 users before Google eventually removed the extension from the Chrome store for violating its hate speech policy after MIC published a story about the extension. ³ This incident reveals how hate speech and malintent can be cloaked by cryptic language, making it difficult to combat.