The face of celebrity has changed dramatically in recent years. That’s not a cheap shot at Kylie Jenner’s lip fillers – it’s true. Aside from tabloids such as the Daily Mail which uphold the old-school ideals of celeb reportage (three Cs: credulity, censoriousness and a concerted effort to divide women up into their constituent body parts), the advent of the meme age has transformed the way we talk about famous people. Where once stars seemed distant, aloof and mysterious, the rise of social media has generated an artificial sense of closeness.

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The two worlds collided last month when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie announced their divorce. It was a revelation that resurrected the pre-web celeb narrative of Jennifer Aniston v Brangelina: the idea that Jolie stole Aniston’s husband and left her single, childless and old (well, 35 at the time, but she is a woman). Aside from Jolie’s 2012 leg fandango, where her bizarre determination to showcase her right leg through a slit in her dress prompted a raft of mocking photoshop jobs, the trio aren’t really meme material, being old-school celebs who avoid social media and whose public outings usually only projected the one expression: smug marrieds.

Luckily there was still Aniston, whose time on Friends had generated feelings of faux-intimacy among fans (it is the ultimate millennial series, after all), as well as providing endlessly memeable footage of her expressing the full gamut of emotions, all of which meant social media users were able to convert the breakdown of a family into viral fun. The resulting memes, mostly repurposed Friends screengrabs, consisted of Aniston looking triumphant at the demise of the evil Brangelina.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The New York Post’s reaction to the Brangelina split. Photograph: Twitter/@nypost

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Notably, US tabloid the New York Post decided to capitalise on this, and its cover channelled the proliferation of memes with a picture of Aniston laughing under the headline “Brangelina 2004-2016”. That this was widely perceived as being excessively crass spoke volumes about the new mode of celebrity coverage. The internet may have made our relationship with celebrities more intrusive, intimate and presumptuous, but it has been tempered by a tone that is often affectionate and amateur; even professional coverage on sites such as Buzzfeed makes itself out to be breathless fan art (“23 times Taylor Swift was right about life”, etc). Yet a powerful celeb-shaming outlet like the Post simply cannot co-opt that mood; when it tries to, it looks try-hard and strange, sort of like Angelina Jolie trying to show people her leg.

Slightly more serious than the marital problems of the super-wealthy are the recent exploits of a web-based frog. Before Dat Boi and Kermit, the frog meme scene was dominated by a single anthropomorphic amphibian. Pepe The Frog began life as a character in a 00s comic called Boy’s Club. In the following years he gained widespread popularity: his likeness became shorthand for a number of “feels” (sadness, smugness, optimism), and his lo-fi Microsoft Paint aesthetic made him one of the most visually distinctive characters on the web.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pepe the Frog. Photograph: Public Domain

It’s fair to say then that his trajectory took something of a left-turn in September, when the Anti-Defamation League made the decision to declare Pepe a hate symbol. Like most bizarre and depressing things that have happened in recent months, it has something to do with one Donald Trump. In October of last year, the Republican candidate retweeted a fan illustration that merged his likeness with Pepe’s. Then, last month, Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump posted a doctored parody of the poster for action film The Expendables on Instagram with the reappropriated epithet The Deplorables (a reference to Hillary Clinton categorising half of Trump supporters as belonging to “a basket of deplorables”). Alongside conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and internet troll du jour Milo Yiannopoulos, there stood Pepe the frog. How did he end up there?

It was thanks to the Trump-supporting white nationalist movement widely referred to as the alt-right. They have spent the past few years co-opting Pepe into their world via a series of racist memes, which in turn made him a symbol for those views. It’s a sad demise for a meme that was once a favourite for so many. More importantly, it’s a scary indication of the internet-savviness of Trump supporters.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump reimagined as Pepe the Frog. Photograph: Twitter/@codyave

Speaking of things that give you nightmares, one unhappy customer recently took to Facebook after sampling some Sainsbury’s vegan cheese, telling the supermarket to “Call it Gary or something just don’t call it cheese because it’s not cheese!” Sainsbury’s responded by mocking up a packet of “Gary” in a tweet, which was shared thousands of times by approving users.

It’s a sign of these strange times that broadcasting the fact your products don’t do what they say on the tin can still be a masterclass in marketing and also an important lesson for shops: next time someone criticises your product on sicial media, don’t play it down – make it a meme.