This was a fairly big meme in media and political circles: http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/3/11853244/google-chrome-exte...

> Yesterday, Mic reported that a Google Chrome extension called "Coincidence Detector" was creating a database of Jewish people in order to notify users when they were reading the work of, or reading about, a Jewish person online. The extension placed three sets of parentheses (a symbol used by neo-Nazis) around certain names to identify them as Jewish. Now, one day later, Google has pulled the extension for violating its hate speech policy, Engadget reports.

Has the triple-parentheses ever been used to signify something previously? Kind of hard to believe that the Wikileaks Twitter account used it coincidentally: http://twitter.com/gallopingcats/status/757527227798003712/p...

Wait, so the idea is that the Wikileaks Twitter account operator installed a neo-nazi chrome extension, then forgot he had it installed and tweeted out in confusion as to why people were tagged, thus outing himself as some sort of Hitler youth with bad memory?

Calling that tweet anti-Semitic just doesn't make sense. It reads like someone trying way too hard to turn a molehill into a mountain. I'm guessing if we look through the history we'll discover that the people attacking him on Twitter had changed their usernames to include the parenthesis.

Uh. No, the Chrome extnsion had long been booted by the time this tweet came along. The meme is that Jewish folks and their allies would intentionally put "(((" and ")))" around their own names as a show of solidarity against this purported targeting. But the implicit meaning of those triple parentheses is, "this person is Jewish". Are you suggesting that the Wikileaks tweeter was just throwing that symbolism out there randomly?

That doesn't make much sense either. Certainly Jews wouldn't be itching to put a metaphorical Star of David on their usernames? Historically that was not a good thing. I can see why Neo-Nazis would jump on it, but it seems strange for members of the community to voluntarily brand themselves in such a way.

I just got why it is six parenthesis though, just like the 6 pointed star.

It's a way of fucking with neo-nazis in turn. The three parentheses were originally meant as a sort of euphemism or code: rather than be publicly anti-semitic, people would put the parentheses to highlight how often Jews were being heard from, the idea being that once you notice the amount of Jewish voices around, you'll think this can't just be a coincidence (hence the name "Coincidence Detector.") It wasn't meant to be something those not in the know would get.

Jews putting three parentheses around their own names is a way of saying "I see what you're doing. I'm onto you." And non-Jews doing it is just to mess with them.

Not really. The Chrome extension has kind of catapulted the idea of "(((name))) == jew" into internet nomenclature. But since isn't quite into popular culture yet, it holds this juxtaposition of being unambiguous, but with plausible deniability.

"I didn't know this dog whistle made a sound."

If you didn't know a device was a dog whistle then that would be a perfectly valid statement.

Right. Hence the plausible deniability.

I doubt whoever runs the wikileaks twitter account was unfamiliar with the history of the 3 parentheses thing. The 3 parentheses people are not doing this to overcome unicode issues.

Also who knows who runs the wikileaks twitter account. I find that a little creepy.

A bunch of the people attacking him, "ironically" were putting the parentheses in their names, and Assange was trying to find the pattern. that understandably upset some people, since it was meant to be a malicious "pattern", but that was neither his fault nor sufficient cause for a bunch of people to just straight up lie about him.

After he got called out on it he went into damage control, I mean seriously it would really compromise his mission to out of the blue just make an intentional overt anti-Semitic remark.

Seriously. Can someone please explain what this means/comes from?