I’m getting bombarded with Facebook posts showing billboards with pro-Trump messages, usually referring to some Golden Age starting on Jan. 20. There are several Facebook pages posting these, but one main one is Next Chapter. Go look for yourselves.
There are two very strange features common to most of these billboards.
First, the photos appear to have been taken outside the U.S. The brand name at the bottom of the billboard seems to be some squiggly language — hard to read because it’s so small, but it looks a bit like Thai. Background shop signs and license plates are also written in these squiggles. It doesn’t look like Cyrilic, which would be my first guess as a Russian hack or bot. The people in the pictures are Caucasians, and one photo has an Eastern-European-looking streetcar.
The second feature is the ubiquitous grammar or spelling mistake. Maybe a misspelled word, like ‘Donold’, or grammar, like ‘is need to’, or even a duplicated or missing word, like ‘like like’. It’s so common, I must conclude that it’s planned and intentional.
Now why would someone intentionally make all those mistakes in English? It’s really a mystery to me, but here are two hypotheses:
A. The bots want to convince the audience that these signs aren’t machine-produced. A machine wouldn’t make all those silly mistakes, would it? Ironically, however, it’s precisely those mistakes that tip you off that a machine IS producing them.
B. The bots are tapping into America’s anti-intellectualism. People who get their English right are suspected as being ‘woke’, so these mistakes attempt to show that the messages are coming from uneducated hillbillies, who, as we all know, possess a knowledge superior to that of those pointy-headed ‘experts’.
Any hints as to where these are coming from? One common Facebook page is Next Chapter, which posts dozens of these billboards. No clue as to where Next Chapter comes from, nor is there any information on the ‘About’ section of the FB page. That in itself is rather suspicious.
Not all the messages are pro-Trump. In the past, Russian interference has aimed at sowing discord rather than supporting one particular party. So a sprinkling of anti-Trump signs confirms in my own mind that this is Russian meddling.
Note ‘like like’, and more squiggles lower right.