I've been noticing a very specific new pattern on YouTube lately: commenters under urban planning videos that talk about the Netherlands, saying that such-and-such is actually hated by Dutch people, or considered a mistake, or a waste of tax money, or whatever... only to be immediately contradicted by a bunch of other Dutch folks and then the original commenter either starts arguing some fallacious bullshit or just disappears.
Now it's not like Dutch people can't be making bullshit claims, but I find it suspicious how this is suddenly starting to happen across *multiple* urban planning channels, and none of the suspicious commenters seem to have any of the linguistic tells of a natively-Dutch English speaker.
@joepie91 so… what are you suggesting it is? Personally, two possible things come to mind: either a targeted trollfarm (though idk what motive anyone would have for that) or a very popular video about that sort of stuff having been uploaded recently, spreading misinfo to the sort of people who mansplain stuff in yt comments based on one piece of info they heard somewhere.
@Riedler Personally, my suspicion would be a trollfarm; the comments are not consistent enough for all of them to be clearly repeating the same video's worth of talking points, and they talk about a fairly wide variety of urban planning topics in NL, all of which are relatively obscure.
I think there would be a pretty clear motive; walkable city design has been seeing a surge in popularity lately, and a lot of this is based on past projects and research from the Netherlands, and so it would make a lot of sense for the car industry - with their decades-long documented history of effective propaganda campaigns - to start pushing back against that with misinformation, because it's a threat to their economic dominance (which is kind of the point).
I don't have any more concrete evidence than circumstantial evidence for this, though, but it would be consistent with said industry's existing track record.
