# Trash Doves Trash Doves is a Facebook sticker set by Florida artist Syd Weiler featuring a big-eyed purple pigeon, most famously an animated sprite of the bird headbanging. After launching on January 31st, 2017, the headbanging dove went viral in Thailand, swept English-speaking Facebook with spam-comment floods, and then got dragged into a 4chan /pol/ culture war that tried to turn it into the next Pepe. ## Origin Florida artist and Adobe Creative Resident Syd Weiler drew most of the purple headbanging pigeons over a single weekend in September 2016, telling HK01 that despite the "Trash Doves" name the characters are actually pigeons[1]. The sticker set went live on Facebook and Messenger as a free download on January 31st, 2017[3]. The stickers sat quietly for about a week before Thai Facebook grabbed them. On February 7th, 2017, the page สัตว์โลกอมตีน (Animals With Paws) posted a music video built around the headbanging dove that pulled in over 3.7 million views within five days[3]. - **Platform:** Facebook (sticker launch) / Thai Facebook (viral spread) - **Creator:** Syd Weiler - **Date:** 2017 ## Overview The Trash Doves set includes more than 20 stickers of a chunky purple pigeon crying, giving heart eyes, looking confused and generally mugging for the camera, but the breakout is the looping headbanger that whips its head up and down at an aggressive speed[1]. Weiler herself described the characters as pigeons dressed up in a joke, telling Hong Kong outlet HK01 that "the Doves are pigeons who like to have fun, and live to make you smile"[1] (translated from Chinese). The sticker's comedy is the volume. Users spammed the headbanger over and over to bomb comment threads, flooding posts with a wall of thrashing birds until the joke was the sheer bombardment itself[2]. That spammability is what pushed Trash Doves out of the sticker drawer and into image macros, GIF edits and photoshops where the dove got pasted onto music videos, concert footage and real-life recreations[3]. There was even a Change.org petition asking Mark Zuckerberg to promote the dancing dove to an official Facebook reaction[4]. ## How It Spread After the Animals With Paws video, Thai outlets including Beartai and CH7 News ran explainers on the sticker invasion, and Khao Sod English picked up the story in English on February 11th, 2017 under the headline "Thainet Flips Out Over Headbanging Bird"[2]. Within hours the dove jumped to English-speaking Facebook, where meme pages like TrashDoveMemes and Reddit threads on r/OutOfTheLoop and r/MemeEconomy tried to figure out why their feeds were suddenly full of purple pigeons[3]. The story turned ugly on February 12th, 2017, when a 4chan /pol/ campaign called "Pek" tried to redraw the bird as a white-supremacist mascot, photoshopping it with swastikas and framing it as a bird-headed reincarnation of the Egyptian god Thoth in the same style /pol/ had used to claim Pepe the Frog as Kek[5]. Left-leaning Facebook pages, including a Feminists United post archived on February 14th, started warning that the dove was a neo-Nazi symbol, which only fed the trolling loop[3]. On February 15th, 2017, The Daily Dot published "A meme war is raging over the future of Trash Dove," documenting the tug-of-war between /pol/ posters trying to Pepe-ify the bird and users who just wanted to spam a cute pigeon[5]. Weiler kept promoting the stickers as harmless, and the Pek rebrand never took, leaving the headbanging dove best remembered as a 2017 Facebook sticker fad rather than a hate symbol[5]. ## How to Use Typical Trash Dove use is still just picking the headbanging sticker from Facebook Messenger and spamming it in a comment thread or chat, often repeated multiple times for a bombing effect[2]. In edits, the bird's looping headbang is a common convention to drop onto music footage, concert crowds or dance clips so the pigeon syncs with the beat[1]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Trash Doves? Trash Doves is a Facebook sticker set of a purple pigeon in various poses, best known for an animated sprite of the bird headbanging up and down[1]. ### Where did Trash Doves come from? Florida artist Syd Weiler designed the stickers, which Facebook released as a free sticker pack on January 31st, 2017[3]. ### What does Trash Doves mean? Weiler said the characters are actually pigeons dressed up as a joke and described them as birds who "like to have fun, and live to make you smile"[1]. ### How do you use Trash Doves? The classic use is spamming the headbanging sticker in Facebook comments or Messenger chats to bomb a thread with thrashing purple birds[2]. ### Is Trash Doves still popular? The sticker set was a short-lived 2017 Facebook fad; after the Thai viral wave and the /pol/ "Pek" meme war it mostly settled into classic status rather than ongoing virality[5]. ## References 1. [https://www.hk01.com/%E7%86%B1%E8%A9%B1/70954/-%E6%B4%97%E7%89%88%E9%B3%A5-facebook%E7%B4%AB%E8%89%B2%E9%B4%BF%E8%B2%BC%E5%9C%96%E7%88%86%E7%B4%85-%E6%8F%88%E9%A0%AD%E5%8B%95%E4%BD%9C%E6%8E%80%E6%94%B9%E5%9C%96%E6%BD%AE]() 2. [https://www.beartai.com/news/149234]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trash-doves]() 4. [https://www.change.org/p/mark-zuckerberg-make-the-dacing-trash-dove-a-facebook-reaction]() 5. [https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/trash-dove-purple-bird-alt-right-meme/]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/trash-doves Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library