I joke that the only people who read this blog are the Russian bots. Turns out I was right. After ten years of monitoring web traffic to this weblog (and my other one), it's gone almost to zero as of March 2022. I noticed this a couple weeks ago, and tried to search up some comments by others, with nothing to be found.
Then a few days ago, I decided search again, this time beyond just other blogspot users, and found this article in the Guardian [soft paywall], which sources none other than the co-author of Memetic Warfare, Joel Finkelstein from the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University. In case you forgot, this was the group that literally wrote a paper with the words "viral insurgency" in the tile, 10 months before the attack on the United States Capitol.
According to them, there's been a "seismic shift in the disinformation sphere towards Ukraine entirely".
The usual deluge of invective prompted by coronavirus and vaccine issues is absent – Russia’s invasion may be a factor. ... Conspiracy theories around the so-called “New World Order” – loosely defined conspiracies about shadowy global elites that run the world – have converged narrowly on Ukraine [link]
So I'm not sure if this directly relates to the traffic on my insignificant page, all the way over here in the United States, but it's hard not to relate the two.
Post Script:
The next time you get upset at a relative who decided not to vaccinate themselves, or a friend who's been donating money to a charity for turning reptile people back into regular people, or even a boss who wants to go on a boat trip to the edge of the earth to prove that it's flat, just remember that it's not their fault. Kind of like drugs and addiction, it's a disease that you catch, and because the disease is contagious, not because you make bad decisions. It's called a virus for a reason.
Notes:
‘Bot holiday’: Covid disinformation down as social media pivot to Ukraine
Mar 4 2022, The Guardian
[soft paywall] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/04/bot-holiday-covid-misinformation-ukraine-social-media
Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and viral Insurgency: How Domestic Militants Organize on Memes to Incite Violent Insurrection and Terror Against Government and Law Enforcement, A Contagion and Ideology Report. Alex Goldberg - The Network Contagion Research Institute, Joel Finkelstein - The Network Contagion Research Institute and The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Rutgers Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience. Feb 7 2020. [pdf link]
This article in WIRED, and the report it references, were from 2018, almost two years before Minneapolis burned to the ground following the killing of a black citizen by local police:
Russia's IRA Targeted Black Americans, Exploiting Racial Tensions
Dec 2018, WIRED.com
The Disinformation Report on Foreign Interference in the 2016 Election
New Knowledge for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dec 17 2018
The Meuller Report
No comments:
Post a Comment