Triple Parentheses / (((Echo)))

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About

Triple Parentheses, also known as (((Echo))), is a symbol used by anti-Semitic members of the alt-right to identify certain individuals as Jewish by surrounding their names with three parentheses on each side. The symbol became a subject of online discussions and media scrutiny in June 2016 after Google removed a browser extension that automatically highlights Jewish surnames in the style.

Origin

According to an article on the news site Mic,^[1] the (((echo))) symbol originated in "Merchant Minute" segments on the podcast The Daily Shoah, launched by the right-wing political news blog The Right Stuff^[12] in 2014. During the show, Jewish surnames would be played with a reverberating echo sound. On The Right Stuff's lexicon page,^[2] the word "Echoes" is listed along with the description "All Jewish surnames echo throughout history."

Precursor

The triple paranthesis can also be found in various antisemitic videos prior to this report from Mic. For example, on September 10th, 2012, YouTuber EATATROLL published a heavily edited video in which actor Marlon Brando makes a number of antisemitic claims without context. At the end of the clip, the video shows text that reads (((Holy Shit))) Mel Gibson had a right to be scared.

Spread

In January 2016, a Chrome extension titled "Coincidence Detector" was made available on the Chrome store, which would query a database of surnames and add parenthesis around names determined to be Jewish (shown below).

On May 26th, The New York Times^[10] published an article by deputy editor Jonathan Weisman titled "The Nazi Tweets of 'Trump God Emperor'", in which he describes being harassed on Twitter by Trump supporters typing his name the parentheses symbols:

The first tweet arrived as cryptic code, a signal to the army of the “alt-right” that I barely knew existed: “Hello ((Weisman)).” @CyberTrump was responding to my recent tweet of an essay by Robert Kagan on the emergence of fascism in the United States. “Care to explain?” I answered, intuiting that my last name in brackets denoted my Jewish faith.

On June 1st, Mic^[11] published an article by staff writers Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith, who traced the use of the symbol back to The Daily Shoah podcast. Additionally the article contained a statement about the echo symbol issued by The Right Stuff, who explained the meaning behind the different parentheses:

"The inner parenthesis represent the Jews' subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism."

The following day, Google removed the Coincidence Detector extension from the Chrome store for violating the company's hate speech policy. On June 3rd, Twitter user Yair Rosenberg^[4] encouraged others to "raise awareness about anti-Semitism" and "show solidarity with harassed Jews" by putting the triple parentheses symbol around their name (shown below). Within 72 hours, the tweet gained over 1,000 retweets and 800 likes.

On June 7th, the echo symbol was added to the Anti-Defamation League's Hate Symbols Database.^[3] In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the anti-Semitic symbol, including The Guardian,^[5] The Mirror,^[6] The Verge,^[7] Vox^[8] and Slate.^[9]