I'm a frontend developer with limited backend knowledge, and I'm trying to investigate if specific accounts are automated Russian propaganda bots. My theory revolves around the misspelling of the word "y'all," which is quite common in Georgia. The accounts appear to have spelled it as "yall@os." I think the apostrophe might have been removed when it was stored in a database, and '@o' might have been used as a placeholder. When this was retrieved and posted, a regex operation could have incorrectly attached the placeholder, resulting in something like: y'all -> y@oall -> yall@os.
Notably, "y'all" is the only English word with three characters after an apostrophe, which could make this an interesting edge case. In Russian, the apostrophe isn't used, so any misspelling here seems unlikely.
I have a few questions:
1. Does my theory seem plausible?
2. Is '@o' commonly used as a placeholder in backend languages?
3. Are there alternative explanations for how "yall@os" could occur?
3 Answers
You could try asking on the Bellingcat Discord. They have coding and data science channels with plenty of knowledgeable folks who could provide helpful insights on your coding queries and open-source intelligence.
Your transformation theory has some holes. If '@o' came from changing the apostrophe in "y'all," how does it suddenly move three characters to the right and add an 's' at the end? Usually, special characters get replaced by values in formatting engines, not displayed as is. It’s also possible that "yall@os" was simply intended as a username or might have been entered that way without any backend manipulation. If '@' wasn't filtered on the input side, it could have just been what the user intended, perhaps even a deliberate attempt to cause some kind of issue.
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