It’s been a rough day for the Republican National Committee’s Latino outreach website.
On Thursday afternoon, the RNC had to hastily take down the site’s banner, which featured a picture of Asian children, replacing it with an all-caps headline “HISPANIC LATINO STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS.”
But other features of the site aren’t working quite as planned, either. The main page features a straw poll asking visitors whether they’re disappointed with President Obama, a talking point Republicans have been pushing as part of their outreach effort. As of Thursday evening, however, Obama was winning the unscientific survey 55 percent to 45 percent — highly unusual on a partisan website.
In another broken feature, the site’s info page, in English “Who Are We?”, is left entirely blank.
There were also serious problems with a “blogs” section, a sparsely populated feed of user posts and press releases designed to showcase Latino Republican voices. The RNC took down dozens of posts Thursday evening, many of which were clearly written by spam bots and consisted of a combination of gibberish and advertising reminiscent of automated advertising feeds like the famous @Horse_ebooks. Portions remained cached via search engines, however.
“How To cease locks the loss In ladies - suggested Ways [sic]” read one typical post headline. From the entry:
“Indiscriminate locks the loss is among the nagging wellbeing dangers we endure from while in the current time. You may really feel dropping locks past your manage on account of some unmanageable factors. In fact, this really is pretty a typical matter on the existing time that a quantity of wellbeing periodicals explore the options to cease locks the loss in women. You may have arrive throughout this sort of content articles popularly offered in different wellbeing and elegance…”
Another post headlined “adcarnalityed badly in creating an ergonomic ambiance,” was entirely incomprehensible:
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…
Other poetic post titles included “or archetype adaptnate, carrots and tomatoes or celery and oambits,” “twice - - the stone refused to,” and “Desiring to escape his bare centermost blazon existence-and a blocked.”
Remaining posts, apparently from actual users, were more direct in their headlines. For example: “OBAMA, EL SOCIALISTA.” As of this writing, it had one comment — a spambot advertisement for handbags.
