Pepe the Frog creator wins $15,000 settlement against Infowars

Victory is latest in a string of legal actions by Matt Furie, who is seeking to halt the co-option of his cartoon by the far right

Matt Furie, the cartoonist behind the character and online meme Pepe the Frog, has won a $15,000 (£12,000) settlement against website Infowars and its creator, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, over use of the anthropomorphic frog in far-right imagery.

Pepe first appeared as a character in 2005 in Furie’s comic Boy’s Club, in which the “peaceful frog-dude” and his animal housemates got up to various college hijinks. His image quickly became a meme on MySpace, and later the anonymous message board 4chan, before it was co-opted by the US “alt-right” in the early 2010s.

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