88 versions of the ad, and the first sentence of the ad contains 14 words. The numbers 14/88 have considerable significance here, especially when paired with the use of a concentration camp symbol..
Sure, but with those tattoos, the 14 & 88 are significant and inescapable. There’s no ambiguity and their presence is not hidden. But once you’re counting the number of words in a tweet, you’re talking about things much more hidden. It doesn’t work well as a dog whistle if the metaphorical dogs can’t hear it, either.
Plenty of ambiguity there. I think you may need to evaluate what your motivation is to need to keep disbelieving that racist dogwhistles can actually be ambiguous, especially considering they are that way by design.
That is an mechanism which insulates even well-documented conspiracies that use numerical symbols as identification banners, which is probably why certain of them do exactly that.
The 14/88 miners have so many degrees of freedom in how they search for these numbers they are always guaranteed to find them. If the number of banned ads was < 88 we would be hearing about how some subset of similar looking ads had size 88.
Hardly. It's 14 words, not 14 anything else. Furthemore, neo-Nazis have in fact also used these numbers in their esoteric numerology in varying degrees of freedom.
It's 14 words, in the same way that "And if you check out some of her other tweets on this, such as" is 14 words. And where is the proof that there were 88 versions of this ad? The Media Matters article has a link "ran 88 ads" that points to [1], but there are only 3 ads on that page.
This "evidence" is a Rorschach test. People see what they're predisposed to see.
If you look at the picture of the 3 ads, each has a number in the top left corner showing how many times it ran, apparently generated by the Dewey Square Adwatch tool set cited in the article. The numbers are 30, 28 and 30, which sum to 88. This could have been better explained in the MM article. It could also be a coincidence, but repeated coincidences eventually qualify as a pattern.
So the ad had run 88 times when Media Matters took the screenshot?
Then if it had continued to run, wouldn't it have run more than 88 times? Or possibly it did run again before Facebook took it down, and actually did run more than 88 times?
Now I'm picturing Media Matters watching the ad counter like teenage boys watching an odometer approach 80085.
Funny that the first sentence of your comment also contains 14 words. I'm not saying it's also a coincidence in the ad, but trying to do numerology without statistics is pointless. A big pile of examples isn't statistics.
So a big part of right-wing troll culture centers on dogwhistles: something that regular people would see and think, "I don't see what the problem is," but has a less wholesome meaning underneath. For instance, the "OK" hand gesture stuff.
We just got a major textbook example of this with the Trump campaign rally in Tulsa, now scheduled for this Saturday.
Originally it was scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, Juneteenth, in Tulsa, site of the notorious 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre.
Simply vile.
And if the excuse is it was all an honest mistake, even worse. That's the sort of cock-up a grade-school competent campaign team would scrupulously avoid.