My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was made for children and built around kindness and friendship. Yet a report published in June 2020 described how part of the show’s adult fan base had become a home for racist and neo-Nazi imagery, and how fans themselves were starting to deal with it.
A fandom born on forums
The animated series ran on the Hub network, later Discovery Family, from 2010 to 2019. It quickly attracted an unexpected audience of adult fans, many of them young men, who called themselves bronies. Much of the early fan culture grew on anonymous image boards such as 4chan, where pony posts multiplied in late 2010 and early 2011, and later on dedicated forums, fan art boards and conventions.
Most of that activity was fan art, music, stories and charity fundraising. But the same anonymous spaces were also known for shock humour and hateful content, and a small group of users mixed pony characters with Nazi symbols and slogans.
The 2020 report
In an article published on 23 June 2020, The Atlantic looked at Derpibooru, the largest board for pony fan art. The site hosted millions of images, the vast majority harmless, but its tagging system also listed hundreds of images marked as racist, along with characters invented by the extremist fringe.
The report came during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, when many online communities were reviewing what they allowed. Fans had pressed Derpibooru to act, and in June 2020 the site changed its rules to ban racist content after a period of internal debate.
A minority, but a visible one
Fans and researchers quoted in coverage at the time stressed that the extremist group was small compared with the size of the fandom, and that many bronies had spent years arguing against it. Others said that the community’s long tolerance of anything presented as a joke had allowed hateful material to stay visible for too long.
The debate fitted a wider pattern. Extremist groups have often used popular culture, memes and fan communities to reach young people online, and moderators of hobby sites have increasingly had to decide where irony ends and propaganda begins.
Sources: The Atlantic, report published 23 June 2020; rule changes announced by the fan art site Derpibooru in June 2020; public history of the fan community.