Free Republic Troll Watch

 FBI profilers and behavioral analysts will often speak of what they call 'leakage'. This is when criminals or suspects voluntarily give up information that reveals their identities or their intentions.  In this case I'm looking at identities.  There's been a fairly frequent trend among some accounts to use conflicting pronouns and this behavior can sometimes be perceived to give away someone's actual identity.  For instance there are some folks who frequently use the pronouns We/Us/Ours and their common usage these days looks like this: We don't need to be part of NATO! What has NATO done for us?  Ukraine is not our problem! This usage intends to establish the perception that the person posting this comment is an American.  Yet quite frequently these same people will post conflicting statements that betray the person's perception that Americans are of another group than the person posting the comment.  The Americans should quit NATO and stop threateni...

 Yesterday I had a surprise interaction on Free Republic that was a textbook match for some of the patterns that I'd identified in my blog post from March 10, 2022.  I thought I'd share the analysis I posted on that discussion. (Reformatted here for clarity) ____________________________________ To:  JimSp; Jane Long; AdmSmith JimSp, Thanks for playing and at Jane’s request I’m going to dissect what you’ve done here. Let’s start with my post that you initially responded to: >To: Navy Patriot >Good. Now we need to sanction every last one of Putin’s blood relatives and every last one of his friends. > >Take their money, take their yachts, take their mansions, sell it all and hand it to the Ukrainians as reparations. > >9 posted on 4/6/2022, 10:12:49 AM by MercyFlush (I don’t  follow the science. I follow the money. ) So here I am applauding the sanctions and nowhere in this post am I discussing the legalities of the sanctions. But I am definitely suppo...

Today's Troll Watch includes specific IP addresses that have sent traffic to and from Free Republic this past week.  It's a huge amount of data that gets captured so it's a bit of a challenge to sort it all out and identify it but I've managed to identify the following IP addresses and they are absolutely from the Russian Federation .  Memo to the trolls: I'm watching you . 😈 5.178.86*77 194.190.76*41 194.190.76*44 94.100.180*197 213.180.204*90 141.101.196*233 151.236.127*145 37.18.24*16 Caution to anyone trying to play with these IP addresses is that they may also host malware or other active defenses that can harm or compromise your computers. Thus I have replaced one of the octet markers with an asterisk to prevent casual or accidental connection to these IP addresses.  That is all. 

 Today's information is not specifically about trolls but about the web traffic on Free Republic.  A little disclaimer first: This information is not sourced from anyone who has anything to do with Free Republic. It is all open sourced data that anyone with some technical skill can obtain on their own.  From January 1, 2022 to April 1, 2022 Free Republic had 9,977,000 unique visits. It is a very busy site!  46.10% of the visitors were using desktop computers and 53.90% were using mobile devices.  Free Republic is globally ranked as the world's 20,535th busiest web site.  Free Republic is the USA's 4,001st busiest web site.  Free Republic has no public facing subdomains.  Free Republic had 321,548 unique visitors in March 2022. Only 29.34% of these visited the site once. The rest visited numerous times with an average visit of 11 minutes and 12 seconds.  In March 96.19% of the unique visitors to Free Republic came from IP addresses in the Unit...

 Today in the Troll Watch the first thing to think about are two of the more popular troll tactics.  When you weigh in on a post with an opinion or facts that counter the troll's designated narrative their two most favored tactics to distract you are these: 1. On off topic response typically coupled with confrontational questions whose intent is to get you arguing about anything other than the topic on hand.  Like if there's a topic about Washington apples and you make an observation about how tasty those apples are a troll is likely to respond with something along the lines of: Oh yeah? Well what about what happened to the Branch Covidians? They had an orange tree and you pro-apple NAZIS murdered all of their children! Do you hate people who grow oranges? You want to murder their children, don't you?  And if you allow yourself to get sucked in you'll now be defending yourself from irrational accusations, you'll be discussing oranges in a topic about apples, and if ...

 Observations for today's Troll Watch: 1. Since I started doing this the identified trolls refuse to engage with me anymore. It's been a glaringly obvious trend where they refuse to engage with me and will even cease posting on selected topics if I weigh in.  2. One troll recently tried to misconstrue what it is to be a 'sleeper' troll. He claimed 'sleepers' were new accounts when in fact the definition of a sleeper is one who appears normal over a period of years until activated for a mission.  3. Trolls do not donate to Free Republic. None of the trolls on my observation list donate to Free Republic. Not even one of them.  Individually this means little, of course, but when 100% of the accounts I observe fail to show up as donating to FR it becomes a statistical improbability especially as several of these accounts are ten or more years old.  That is all. 

 Today in the Troll Watch the two primary narratives are as follows: 1. The variations on the theme of "Why don't you go to Ukraine and fight for them?" continues but has started to decline. Eighty four such identified posts were made on March 14, 2022 and that declined to twenty-three such posts on March 17, 2022.  2. The previous variations on the hypothetical question of Mexico or Canada deploying Russian or Chinese nuclear weapons has declined precipitously. Forty-three such identified posts were made on March 14, 2022 and that declined to twelve on March 17, 2022.  A new narrative has surfaced in which the West is being assigned responsibility for the potential use of nuclear weapons by Putin and Russia. The contention being that the West may 'force' Russia to use nuclear weapons if the West does not bow to Putin's demands.  A potential narrative is developing in which Poland is being promoted as a new threat against Russia and also being promoted as a ro...