Right now this new 'perception' is pretty limited to a certain US-centric news bubble. Everyone outside that bubble in the US, and generally people everywhere else, are likely to laugh in your face if you tried to convince them the OK gesture is a hate symbol now.
Your average person hasn't even heard of this inane controversy. I for one have to seek out the kind of demographic who thinks that way online - because nowhere else could I even find anyone.
It's impossible to take these claims seriously. The media will publish anything that gets clicks, no matter how exaggerated or even fabricated, the people making up these claims know they'll get instant coverage and spread their 'cause', and the people spreading the idea that some loser somewhere saying "uh, the middle finger stands for the monolithic purity of the white race" is actually a threat to the fabric of society just enjoy having another thing to be morally panicked by.
The swastika was a symbol of good luck, the infinity of creation and the unconquered, revolving sun for millennia. Now it's the symbol of the Nazi party and their atrocities. It's not fair, but that's how symbols work. Their meanings can change when new meanings are ascribed to them.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white...
If a bunch of far-right dipshits want to rally around a cartoon frog and what used to be an innocuous hand gesture, then the meaning of those symbols is going to shift. You're the one playing into their hand. You're the one letting the cryptos remain crypto, instead of illuminating and naming their behavior, for shame.
He didn't lose his job because of 4chan, but because of ostensibly well-intentioned midwits who believe "4chan succeeded in transforming a symbol" and "fake things can be real". Truly, this type of rationalization is the Bell Curve meme in action.
He was fired because of the reaction -- engineered by 4chan -- of over-intellectualizing social justice nabobs who attend rallies and protests. You guys were literally told the punchline of the joke and still walked right into it.
Obviously the twitter hive-mind went too far in singling this one guy out, and SDG&E colossally fucked up in not doing basic due diligence before firing him. That doesn't change the fact though that there are people out there who do indeed use the hand sign to unironically mean exactly the things that 4chan set out to convince people that it meant. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending otherwise is nothing short of willful ignorance.
The false information that this gesture means anything has everything to do with that man being fired, and contributes absolutely nothing to the awfulness of the Christchurch shooting, but you feel there is somehow an equivalence? Not only that, but you think there's moral superiority afforded to you for making this observation?
They set out to transform a symbol, and they succeeded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture#White_power_symbol
If you think it isn't real because it was made up, Vonnegut's Mother Night has you covered: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”