Tag: trolls

One thing I’ve noticed recently, in sifting through the spam comments on my blog, is how many come from Russians now. And on one post, in particular.

See, I stopped looking at the spam comments after a while. This kind of went along with my overall dip in blogging that I mentioned yesterday. The comments seemed to be always and endlessly spam, and never any legit ones. Always jam yesterday and none today. The White Queen haunts me.

Of course, some of this came as a natural consequence of me not blogging comment-worthy stuff. But then I did say something interesting, and my friend, the lovely Grace Draven, mentioned to me on Facebook that she commented at length–but I didn’t see it. It was in my spam folder, because apparently Grace is actually a troll selling off-brand cross-trainers and possibly nudie webcam dancing. I was able to rescue her comment, and set about housecleaning that bursting folder. 

I’ve been trying to keep up with it better – with the help of wonderful assistant, Carien – and I’ve noticed something very interesting. Most all of the spam comments are on one old post from 2014, called “Taking Guns to the Mall.”  (Note: I’ve since changed the title, in an effort to stop the spam bots.) And the comments come from people with Russian names and often with Cyrillic characters in them. They’re the usual balderdash of jigsaw puzzled paragraphs of technical information with links, both commercial and likely nefarious. What happens here is that bots are crawling the internet looking for search terms and submitting these “comments” to the posts. 

Interesting search terms, huh?

It’s fascinating to me to have my own small intersection with a worldwide plague, one that very likely contaminated the 2016 election. Evidence cited in that article indicates that Russia-backed posts reached as many as 126 million Americans on [Facebook] during and after the 2016 presidential election.  

If you haven’t seen it, this video of Senator Franken grilling the Facebook lawyer is full of awesome. 

At any rate, I considered deleting that post, or changing the title to something less likely to tempt the trolls out from under their bridges. For now I’ve tried turning off comments to the post. It will be interesting to see how that works.

Meanwhile, that’s still one of my favorite photos of David, dressed as a pirate in the big hat. Sail on, me hearties.