“’s Am I the only one seeing these symbols? Home computers, work computers, iPhone, they seem to be popping up all over the place with great frequency these days.”
No, pretty much everyone is seeing them and on pretty much all browsers. The problem is with websites using mixed up font encodings, usually so-called “smart quotes”, and there’s nothing the browsers can do about receiving ill-posed data.
BTW, I’m only seeing them on FR, so I suspect when someone composes a response that has “smart quotes” included and then copies and pastes into the comments section is where the problem lies. This has happened in the past at FR and then stopped, but now has come back again, so I suspect a bug in the FR web filter that accepts pasted text.
https://askleo.com/why_do_i_get_odd_characters_instead_of_quotes_in_my_documents/
As they used to say on the Outer Limits:
“There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now in control of the transmission ... we will control all that you see and hear.”
Being filtered thru the UTAH data storage compound may have some effect on what Conservatives are seeing.