Did Transport for London put up THAT Donald Trump sign?

A photograph of what appears to be a Service Information board from Transport for London (TfL) is spreading across the Internet with a not-so-nice message aimed towards Presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

The message, in all its glory, can be seen below unedited, though for the easily offended, you may want to skip it.

TFL welcomes everybody of ALL faiths except Donald Trump
The nylon-haired tosser can FUCK OFF

The viral circulation of the photograph at an unnamed tube station resulted in many questioning whether this really was a message from those working at the TfL, or perhaps a prank by an opportunist journey maker.

The truth is that the image is the result of digital manipulation. The writing may appear to be handwritten, but upon closer inspection you can see that many of the same letters that appear throughout the message are identical to each other, suggesting that this was created using a font designed to appear like handwriting.

In fact it was the result of a free Internet program that allows anyone who visits it to create their own “handwritten” message to be digitally added to the Service Information whiteboard. The program was located at tubesign.herokuapp.com, and was created by a UK based developer named Tim Waters. Waters created the program, but the user who penned the message about Donald Trump is unknown.

The original image of the sign is here.

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However plenty of different jokes have been created via the program, all featuring the same photograph of the TfL Service Information board with different messages written on it. It became so popular that TfL actually demanded the program be removed because it was – according to them – being used to spread racially offensive messages that many people believed to actually have come from TfL.

Waters has since removed the app but at the time of writing it forwards to another domain that currently offers the exact same features, presumably created by another developer using the same code (that Waters offered for free, so we hear!)

Either way, no, the message was not penned by anyone working for Transport for London. It was penned by an anonymous person using a free Internet “prank” program.