About

Trash Doves is a set of Facebook stickers featuring a large-eyed purple pigeon in various situations, the most notable of which is an animated sprite of the bird vigorously thrashing its head up and down. Shortly after its debut on Facebook at the start of 2017, the purple dove sticker set quickly became a viral subject of photoshopped parodies, gifs and image macros on the social media.

Origin

Florida artist and Adobe creative resident Syd Weller's "Trash Doves" sticker set officially made its Facebook debut on January 31st, 2017, which included an animated emoji of a headbanging pigeon (shown below).







As early as on February 7th, the sticker suddenly went viral in Thailand, beginning with a music video posted on the Facebook page สัตว์โลกอมตีน (Animals With Paws), where it garnered more than 3.7 million views within five days.





Spread

Throughout the week, the purple dove stickers continued to gain momentum on Facebook Thailand, which was then picked up by several Thai internet news outlets in the following days. By February 11th, the "purple dove" sensation had reached the English-speaking Facebook, prompting a flood of spam comments featuring the headbanging sticker on the social networking site, as well as a growing volume of image macros and photoshopped videos based on the same image on Facebook , YouTube and Reddit , among others.

Pek

On February 12th, 2017, a campaign urging internet users to depict the trash dove as a symbol of white supremacy named "Pek" began circulating on 4chan's /pol/ and various Facebook pages, including Pinochet's Dank Meme Stash. Shortly afters, posts began appearing on left-wing pages accusing the bird of being a Nazi symbol (shown below, right).





On February 13th, a Medium post titled ''Right Wing Dove Squad: How Trash Doves Became The Symbol of The Alt-Right'' was posted on Medium, which included Nazi-themed photoshops of the trash dove (shown below, left). On February 14th, a screenshot of a Feminists United Facebook page calling the trash dove a "symbol for neo nazis" was submitted to 4chan's /pol/ board (shown below, right). On February 15th, The Daily Dot published an article titled ''A meme war is raging over the future of Trash Dove.''





Examples





GIFs





Search Interest

Know Your Meme Store

External References