Well, y'know then Poe's Law[0] kicks in. Repeating racist dogwhistles but doing it "to own the libs" is y'know, still repeating racist dogwhistles. I can totall

Well, y'know then Poe's Law[0] kicks in. Repeating racist dogwhistles but doing it "to own the libs" is y'know, still repeating racist dogwhistles. I can totally understand a company like GitHub for purely cynical money reasons not wanting to be affiliated with that sort of thing even if it's ironic (which, Poes Law, I have no reason to believe is the case with Automatic). As for the OK sign thing; that was a case of "4chan sliced a bunch of older pictures together of Trump and his ilk making an OK-sign" (which yeah, it's a common hand gesture, wow). The kinda strange thing is that it resulted in a sort of self-perpetuating effect; you had in part the media falling for the prank, but at the same time, those very same Trump supporters started doing the OK-hand deliberately to indicate what political "team" they belonged on. It fell out of favor with those Trump supporters after a bit (because y'know, it was just a trend and trends defined solely by "trolling the libs" don't tend to last; eventually "the libs" catch on and they need something new). Basically doing something ironically can make the people whose behavior you're emulating think they're in good company. Unless you take it to straight up absurdist levels (no Nazi will ever use Springtime for Hitler as propaganda), that will always happen. Stuff like being clear about it being made to mock (as with Poes Law, which suggests things like the /s sarcasm marker) or extreme absurdity (Springtime) helps avoid that. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law