Tuesday, February 13, 2018

#84 - The Russians Are After....ME!



The Russians are after ME, And I have proof!

When I started blogging about a year ago, I was pretty clueless.  I started posting to a free Google owned platform called Blogger,  but soon realized I was at a severe disadvantage here.

First, the platform itself got relatively little traffic.  Second I was fighting for space against Stephen Colbert monologues and anti-Trump cartoons, which frankly appealed more to me than my own stuff… so you can see the problem here.  And third, my little opinion pieces were averaging two pages in length (right, I’m working on that ) and in this day and age of instant everything, asking someone who has no clue who you are, to spend so much time reading your musings, well, that just was asking an awful lot. 

Over time I found some success in simultaneously posting to half a dozen left leaning groups on Face Book (the right leaning ones wouldn’t take me. I know, I tried)  These sites got  a lot more traffic,  that’s where I now can get some amount of name recognition in friendly confines   But I still post everything to Blogger, where everything remains aggregated, for my own record keeping purposes

The thing about Blogger, is the site captures all kinds of cool stats, including the location of the viewer. As you can see by the picture I posted the # 2 country is Russia, albeit it’s a distant #2.  

Still, why would Russia, have ANY interest in me, in my extremely small corner of the world?  Who the hell am I?  No one. 

The only logical explanation is my constant use of the “T” word ( I don’t want to call the moron by name, for they are probably watching me right now) . That must be very appealing to them.  You see the Russians have these automated bots out there scouring Face Book and any and all other Internet sites.   In speaking with some IT folks, it turns out, Russian probing and targeting is pretty routine, everywhere.

Laura Rosenberger, who studies Russian influence operations as director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, says given messages are geared for specific groups where they have more “currency” as they look to push different groups to extremes.  If they pickup on any pro-Trump musings, they then work to reinforce those ideas with whatever crap and fake news they come up with and push it out to those same pro Trump followers

So, I know the bots will keep checking me out.  It’s what they do.   They can’t help themselves. But if they were smart, they’d already know that any pro-Trump propaganda they might send my way, would just be falling on deaf ears.   Their time would be better spent searching out and abusing other poor unsuspecting folks who have real difficulty separating truth from fake news.  Sad to say, there are a lot of people in the country who fall into that category.

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