The posting cited a rather strange article from a source that I had never heard of:
As Frontier Communications strikes nearer to an anticipated chapter
> [11] submitting, the ISP advised buyers that its troubles stem
> largely from its failure to take a position correctly in upgrading
> DSL to fiber broadband.
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The wording of this text immediately struck me as odd -- "strikes nearer"? "Submitting" instead of "submission"? "Take a position correctly"?
The rest of the article's body was also filled with stilted and erroneous English and egregious punctuation and capitalization when I read it on Friday morning. As I write this on Tuesday night, the web page is still up, but the body of the story now trails off into ellipses near the beginning of the second sentence. The author is listed as "Maria J" -- what reputable journalistic outlet refuses to display the surnames of its reporters? A reverse image search reveals that the accompanying picture of "Maria J" is a stock photo from
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, and the concomitant mini-bio reads (errors in original):
Maria is Sr.Content Editor in Whit Worth, She had worked as Electronics Engineer and written many journals on Electronics and Sensors. and whe write articles for us on the topic of TECHNOLOGY.
The contact page for the "Whitworth Gazette"
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is also chock-full of butchered English and lists a mailing address in San Diego on a nonexistent street (one unknown to both Google Maps and USPS.com).
Interestingly, the Whitworth Gazette has a Twitter account
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and an Instagram page
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which both contain postings referencing the main thewhitworthgazette.com website, which they describe as "The magazine for owners of vintage British motorcycles". Both of those accounts themselves display content consistent with that description. However, the Twitter page's most recent post is over two years old. I can't tell whether the Instagram page is similarly dormant because I don't have (and will not get) an Instagram or Facebook account, which would allow me to look at the site's posts in detail. But my working theory is that a once-legitimate but now-disused UK website has been hijacked by a "fake news" platform, for purposes unknown. Most of the stories don't appear to be truly false, but rather seem to be legitimate news items stolen from elsewhere and subsequently repackaged, badly, by mangling some of the wording. In the case of this particular article about Frontier Communications, the original legitimate article is presumably
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.
My takeaway from this odd case? It's always a good idea to treat articles from sites of unknown provenance with a caution bordering on skepticism.
Bob Goudreau Cary, NC