UKC

So, it turns out that the official congratulations message to Biden tweeted by Downing Street has been modified graphically from one congratulating Trump, and contains the remnants of that old message.

https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-congratulatory-tweet-to-joe-biden...

We should be proud, there's really nothing our government can't f*ck up. They're the best f*cker-uppers in the world, truly a world beating government in that field.

I've had a look, it's quite real. You can see the original message here:

https://twitter.com/borisjohnson/status/1325133262075940864

If you save it to your PC and open it in, say, MS Paint and do a bucket fill of the background, it's there quite clearly. Or play with the brightness and contrast in Photoshop. In fact, you can make it out just zooming in on the original, if your screen is good.

Looks like they were so sure Trump would win they had to do a hasty edit, and didn't even think to start from scratch with a fresh file. Astonishing.

Bloody hell. 

It's almost as if populist nationalism appeals to incompetent deluded fools.

Is there no limit to their incompetence ?

I'm calling BS on this claim from Sky.

A quick play with the contrast and a flood fill tool on the original (left, accessed 14:21 today from twitter.com) and the Sky version of the original (right, accessed today 14:22 from news.sky.com ) shows no such thing in either.  There is a lot more in the way of noticeable JPEG compression artefacts in the Sky version suggestion it's been re-saved at least once from an editing package.

There is also absolutely no sign of the envelope of fading grey levels shown in Sky's "enhanced" image that in either the original or Sky's "original".  I could believe that the Twitter image was updated as soon as this came to light, but I struggle to see why Sky would go with the updated image and not the one they have "enhanced" from.

Sky's "enhanced" image does not correlate with their "original" image in terms of precise pixel locations etc.  Look at the widest sentence - it stretches right to the edge, compared to the claimed original above it.  

There's no integrity to any of the data they are presenting what so ever.  Lots of alarm bells.  An astounding claim to make without something a bit better to back it up.  It could be true and they're incompetent at reporting.  It could be false and they're incompetent at fact checking or fabricating their sources.  it could be absolutely anything.  But I don't think it's news.

Yes. My Mac screen is set extremely bright, and if I turn it up to maximum, there's not a trace of any ghost image. Then taking a screenshot and putting it in Photoshop, and altering the levels to an extreme, absolutely nothing extraneous shows up.

Why, precisely, would I or anybody else want to do this, other than trying to make a story out of nothing?

But the government seem to have acknowledged it happened?

I can see the artefact in the image copied from https://twitter.com/borisjohnson/status/1325133262075940864

Interesting. Perhaps if its on the internet its considered true and immutable!

A quick search doesn't lead me to the origin of this story. Its all over the new feeds, but I don't expect a bored journo would have been fiddling with what should have been a simple message.

Also why recycle such a message. It would be quicker to just redo in your editor of choice.

I've done it myself with the image downloaded from Twitter. I can see it faintly on my screen without doing anything else, a lot better in Photoshop tweaking contrast and brightness, and clearly after bucket fill in Paint. It's definitely not bs.

Just tried again. Screen grab of bucket fill in ms paint:

That's what I though but a software crash and a short spell of waiting for my company's global IT behemoth to trundle into action, decided to go to the PM's twitter, copy the image, paste into paint and low and behold, it does appear to have some faint text "rump on h" visible, in a smaller font above Biden and on. I then bucket filled the background with pink and it was clearly visible.

Quite why they would do this is beyond me. You'd have thought they could have borrowed one of the boutique PR gurus from the vaccine task force to sort it....

Like I said "It could be true and they're incompetent at reporting."

The Sky News report is not internally consistent as the "original" they present does not contain the hidden message.

The Guardian have an "original" image that does contain the hidden content.  Contrast boosted version below, but theirs is so poor quality it can't be read (without preconception helping).

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/10/johnsons-biden-win-tweet-c...

It's all very bizarre.  I also find it suspicious how only a couple of words come through and one is "Trump"...    It's got a real X-files ring to it...

I've linked the original on bj's official Twitter account in my original post, second link, no need to pull  it from a newspaper site.

I've just played it backwards on my record player (33 rpm) and it distinctly says 'Worship Satan'. I'm scared.

You're wrong: try the image from Twitter.

(I don't think this is important however.)

Proper designers seem to think it's true, based on what they've taken from Johnsons original tweet, so I'll take their word. 

FWIW, I think it's an indicator of incompetence, rather than evil intent, though I'm sure a Trump second term would have helped the Tufton St crowd rather more than Biden

Thanks. It's a bit bizarre seeing it "discredited" when I can see it myself in the tweet from number 10!

Not in itself, no - it just shows lack of attention to detail, and maybe that they handed it to one of their mates to do rather than a designer. And maybe also that they only had the Trump congratulation ready in advance.

To repeat: it's visibly there for me if I tweak contrast on the image taken directly from the Twitter feed. That is: it's true.

I don't think it's important however. Both graphics were obviously prepared in advance, to be issued as appropriate depending on who won the election. It's no big deal.

Humble pie from me and apologies to Skog!

In the file "EmPRWjyVoAEBIBI.jpeg" downloaded from Twitter today at 14:14 there is indeed the partial word "rump" visible above "Biden". 

My rather lame excuse is that I didn't realise that the flood fill in my paint package of choice - The GIMP - has some fuzzy boundary that fills over minor intensity differences unlike MS Paint which fills only the exact colour level.

The "original" as presented by Sky has absolutely no such hidden text however.  Having poured over it in detail I think this is because they've re-compressed it and the compression has left empty blocks where the very low contrast text was, so I'm going with this from my options "It could be true and they're incompetent at reporting."

But I feel I'm in no position to go making claims of incompetence right now!

Edit: I just tried to report my message to ask a big rider be added at the front to state the author wishes it to be reported as wrong.  I can't report my own messages.  If someone else would like to, adding a link to this one, please do.

Sorry Skog.   If I could dislike my first post, I would!  Can I please encourage everyone else to click away on the dislike button.

I started of with the Sky story and then didn't peer hard enough into the original, and didn't understand a limit of the tool I was using (too clever), and - checks excuse book - there was a sunspot messing up my monitor feed. 

OK, I accept that. I can only think that the 'original' image on Twitter and on Sky/Ukc had the gamma set differently so that it didn't show up on the Mac (I've got the gamma set perfectly on my laptop Mac ...  I think. I need now to look at it on my very high quality Mac monitor on my desktop Mac, which I know is calibrated perfectly).

Like you, I don't think it's important, because it's extremely likely that Downing Street had one photoshop file with two different layers for both outcomes, and the Trump one was left open by a few percentage points by mistake when they made the jpeg of the final result.

OK, just to confirm (for what it's worth) I can see the ghost image on my big desktop Mac monitor. It seems I've set my laptop deliberately a bit more contrasty to deal better with daylight/outdoor situations.

I Don't think Johnson himself is responsible, but this is just symptomatic of the shoddy and incompetent ethos of the people he surrounds himself with. The process of Government HAS to have attention to detail, even if the "leader" is all about the grandiloquent press opportunities

I was just sharing an amusing story of government incompetence, I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition!

No worries - you may have used the wrong image, but you did at least do a pretty thorough examination of it.

Looks like Tommy Vietor is going to have to rescind his fulsome praise of our PM!

https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/1325137653851828230?s=19

This is the key point.  There's a pattern of hiring incompetent tossers because they are somebody's mate/wife/husband and lack of attention to detail and laziness from people at the top.   When the guy at the top works hard and pays attention everybody else knows they have to double and triple check their work.

For a government that is very much style over substance this has neither.

I'm sure somewhere there are diplomats slowly hitting their heads against a wall repeating: For. F*uck. Sake.

And all the while Biden is entirely unbothered, unoffended and might possibly be wondering why the Brits have enough time to fret over such trivialities.

Perhaps we might consider this our own little ‘Four Seasons’ moment.

Given it's completely unnecessary to screw up in this way and that suspiciously the only clearly decipherable word is 'rump' I suspect whichever boutique PR guru they chose they didn't choose quite well enough. Even if they just keep recycling the black '10' template which is reasonable, what are the odds that's the only fragment to survive someone scribbling the old message out with a too soft brush? That and the fact it was found! I know it's usually incompetence not malice but it's just too much, It's got to be the easter egg of a disgruntled No 10 twitterer.

jk

Is this really news worthy?

We are obviously going to officially congratulate whoever wins.  What's the problem if they have 2 tweets ready to go and edit once they know who's won?

Nothing, if they do it right!

This is like sending a congratulations card with the old name scored out and the new one added.

"Those are nice fonts, they don't come cheap. Then there's the design to consider and the focus groups. We'd normally charge £200k for such a project. But as we were at school together, I'll do it for £150k, mates rates. (You can have it for 17% less, if you're paying cash..)"

No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

I’m just assuming that it’s just the office boy/girl who got the job as all the graphic designers have retrained in “cyber”.....

Not really but it does rather encapsulate the lack of attention to detail this government seems to embody. It’s the kind of thing I would be embarrassed about, if I sent a document to a client which was obviously cribbed from a document sent to another client, with their logo half visible, let alone in an official tweet of congratulations to the new leader of free world, who already thinks our PM is a cretin and to whom we are sat, cap in hand, desperate for any kind of trans Atlantic deal that will salvage us from the train wreck of Brexit.

C'mon a complete and total non story.  We are in the midst of global pandemic, at a time of fraught international relations, enormous change for the UK/Europe relationship, environmental and economic catastrophe and we are supposed to care about a ghost image in the background of a tweet? FFS people get a grip!

Nothing wrong with that, in fact, they SHOULD be prepared for either outcome. Congratulations are the least of the problems, but they should have policy options A,B, and C ready for a Trump reelection, a narrow Biden win, or a blue wave.

However, that means two separate image files, not one partially erased and recycled one. This is such an off hand, amateur mistake to make, that it becomes almost insulting.

I assume whoever did this made the Trump one first, and then "cleared" the text in the upper part by adjusting the brightness and contrast to ALMOST black. At least his is how a computer illiterate ten year old might do it having seen photoshop for the first time.

CB

I've had great fun over the years with pointing out embarrassing original file details and track changes. Naïve as I was initially I thought after the first time it would never happen again.

Funny how quick apologists can be to make light of incompetence. If you can't get the trivial things even vaguely right, what hope for the important things you listed?

It was perhaps done as two layers in Photoshop/Illustrator and the office bod that was tasked to send the relevant image for Twitter messed up by either not deleting the redundant layer, or thought they'd effectively deleted it via opacity, etc.

You felt the need to ask ?

If they can't get something as simple as this right, how likely are they to get something as complicated as Covid sorted ??

I agree, although it does little to dispel the Biden team's view that Johnson is 'a shape-shifting creep'.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/09/the-guardian-view-on-...

I don't think this is it, as there are only three bits of the original message visible, I'd expect to see it elsewhere in the image if the layer had been left in.

It looks as if the message to Trump was created first, then the person creating the Biden message tried to scrub that out somehow (possibly some sort of fill that wasn't quite complete, or just plonking the new stuff on top of the old and failing to notice that it didn't quite obscure all of it).

I had assumed it was a rush job done because they only made the Trump one then suddenly found themselves having to rework it for Biden, and that remains possible, but it is also possible that they made both in advance - but if so, they still made the Biden one from the Trump one, rather than just starting clean.

Well maybe, but to be honest I don't really care and I doubt Biden really cares.

Aren't folk getting whipped into a bit of a frenzy over how terrible Boris is?

Yes, what's revealing about it is the level of incompetence and amateurism, but of course this example pales into insignificance compared with the almost unprecedented farce of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping centre. What was so amazing about that was that, far from going into a damage limitation exercise, they went through with it, resulting in what must arguably be the most farcical press conference in the whole of history. As we used to say in the old days, it was "pure Monty Python".

James O'Brien this morning tweeted that he'd 'love to see "between a crematorium and a dildo shop" become a figure of speech, rather in the manner of 'between a rock and a hard place', I guess.

This clearly isn't a major incident, certainly not on a par with paying your mates elevated prices for PPI or track and trace contracts they can't even fulfill properly, but it does seem to me that you'd have to go right out of your way to pretend it isn't a bit embarrassing.

I don't see anyone in a frenzy about how terrible Johnson is, but make no mistake about it - he really is terrible.

By letting your PR minions deal with twitter feeds, and focusing your resources on the big problems. Do we really want our Prime Minister spending his time signing-off a tweet and delving into how the graphic was created? Stop being ridiculous.

There is some more text decipherable down at the bottom of the slide, under "shared priorities" where it appears to say "the future of <illegible>.

I think it's sheer incompetence, no need for conspiracy theories of any sort.

P.S. for anyone wrestling with their graphics package - the sensitivity of flood fill in the Gimp (and probably anything more sophisticated than Paint) can be set to different levels...

Oh I agree he's terrible but I doubt he produced that piece of artwork himself. I just think it's easy to get to a stage where anything that the government does is automatically bad which of course is a bad mindset to get into, "two legs bad, four legs good" and all that.

Anyway, anyone wishing to get angry might want to have a look at this chart which maps out all the connections between Boris' friends who just happen to have been awarded contracts etc to fight the pandemic.

https://sophieehill.shinyapps.io/my-little-crony/

No, I don't expect Johnson to sign off, or even look at, anything. We know he doesn't do "detail". However you would hope there was some level of checking of something sent out via social media.

It says HMG is on par with a dodgy company doing crap ads on Facebook that any potential customer looks at and thinks; "Christ, they must be about 8 years old, I'm not sending them £10 via paypal".

"My Little Crony", that's a brilliant title!

Oceanrower had that nailed 100x better on the other thread

I’m more bothered with them exploiting a terrible crisis to steal our money and siphon it off to their cronies. People should be going to prison for it, but everyone will shrug and ignore it. It makes me sick. 

Thank you. Better than James O'B is praise indeed!

Yes, your 'between a cock and a charred place' was brilliant.

Marina Hyde has some pointed observations on this, as usual :

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/10/four-seasons-total-la...

Thanks for that. Once she starts comparing the FSTL centre with us now, with our Brexit strategy, she hits top form. 

PS. Loved the 'Turin shroud of digital incompetence' ...

Who did Biden phone first of all the world leaders, to maintain the special relationship?

Trudeau, I believe.

I think he accepted a call from Johnson a bit later on, though, if that's the answer you were hoping for.