Free Republic Troll Watch

 I was wrong and you were right. Thank you for your contribution here. This is not about pushing an agenda but about getting to the facts.  Again, thank you. 

 Ever since the Russian War to conquer Ukraine started in February the trolls have employed a variety of tropes to forward their various narratives on Free Republic.  Neocon remains one of their favored tropes and they throw this one around like a crazed monkey throws shit at the zoo. Everyone is a neocon who doesn't support Russia's war of conquest in Ukraine.  What's truly entertaining is when they throw this at each other .  Nazi is still a popular trope although the impact of it has been lost since it's been so overused.  You should go fight for Ukraine is a recurring trope and I've found the best way to answer it is with Why don't you go fight for Russia? The pathetic little worms conspicuously run away and hide when confronted on this one.  What if Russia or China puts nukes into Canada or Mexico? is still showing up quite frequently. It's a pointless argument because neither Canada or Mexico is particularly in love with China or especially Russia...

 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 ...