Russian Astro-spam?

by on August 8, 2008 · 16 comments

This is fascinating. A co-blogger on my other blog did a very short post about the Russia-Georgia conflict. Within a few hours, we got 11 comments, not obviously spam, from different IP addresses, all of them pro-Russian. And, it should be noted, my other blog gets even less traffic than this one does, so it’s extremely unlikely that I just happen to have dozens of Russian readers who have never commented before.

I’m really curious why this happened. I can think of three explanations:

  • The comments were made by distinct, real people. This would be similar to the Ron Paul fiasco, in which a ton of genuine Ron Paul fans apparently Googled for Ron Paul’s name and spent a ton of time promoting his candidacy. This seems to me like the most likely possibility, but it’s pretty impressive if true.

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    Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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