It seems like any site these days that isn’t moderated, is being spammed by Trump supporters. Many are trying to pass their posts off as original thoughts, but this isn’t true. If you want to be able to track where their ideas are coming from, here is a handy list of websites they frequent. This way, you can anticipate what sort of phrases will be posted and seamlessly set your filters to flag and delete redundant or hateful content.
Breitbart News: Milo Yiannopulous
Much of it also comes from Reddit and 4Chan /pol/ by way of the Chateau and its readers who have infiltrated the “cult of Kek”, but there is so much other content on these sites that the above are a better guide.
They will claim on your site that they’re not “white” nationalists, but then they get their material from “white” nationalist sites. Everything will mirror the opinions on these sites word for word, to the point of direct quotes, just without using common racial slurs. Some go as far as to use code words, which you can keep track of by viewing the sites.
Any supposed “news” site in which the articles coincide with opinion posts from the leaders, who are mostly old trolls from the usenet days in the 90’s, is fake. They’re being led by the nose by the people responsible for the “endless September” who simply reinvented themselves. If you allow them to, they will take over, and turn your site into a spam infested circle jerk of “white” nationalists.
You can be sure that whatever the main three write about, memes, Facebook posts, and all sorts will flow from within minutes.
…and speaking of memes, it has come to my attention that some meme sites were created basically to propagate pro Trump “white” nationalist memes. Of course, not everyone who prefers Trump over Hillary Clinton is consciously a WN, but a certain stream of them is, and this is what’s going around the internet lately.
According to a few bloggers, people in both Trump and Clinton’s camp are being paid to post propaganda. It explains a lot that I don’t want to speculate on about why some sites suddenly went WN or rabid SJW. I don’t want to point any fingers until the truth comes out explicitly, if ever.
Anyway, I stumbled upon one of the meme sites a lot of Trump WN spam comes from, where the admins seem to approve of harassment of unsuspecting non insane people, and favor the WN’s. That is IMGglip.com. So if you don’t want your site spammed, you may want to block traffic from there, and delete political images with their watermark. Mind you, I’ve done some research, and the site’s owner and (possible) admins are not “white” nationalists as far as I could tell. They seem like nice, reasonable people. They just tolerate too much on their site, and it spills over, so until they at least don’t allow harassment and ganging up on other users, you don’t need the crazy-spam. So if you find the needles in the haystack, do things the old fashioned way and download and credit if known, and put a separate link back to the image. Don’t hotlink or embed.
It’s a shame, since there are some decent users there who don’t know what’s going on until they run afoul of one of the self pitying whiners, but they should find another site that isn’t full of canned politics.
Unfortunately, there is no meme site that isn’t being plagued at the moment, so you may have to just block traffic from all of them. It’s a bit extreme, but if you want your site to remain a real-user friendly place, you may have to go there. Require that any images, if they’re allowed, not be hotlinked at all. An extra step may not stop it completely, but you’ll at least be able to see where exactly it is coming from, without the meme sites as a proxy.
IMGflip Users Fight Back
On February 1, 2017, the majority of the most active and highest ranking users of IMGflip decided that there will be peace. It started with Ghostofchurch’s call to speak out against fatally stupid comments, and continued with OlympianProduct’s call for a truce. It was a tough sell and there was even flaming in the peace threads, but in the end, it seems that it will hold as some of the worst offenders reluctantly saw the futility of flamewars, and the harm they could do when a site owner has enough.
Most sites with the same situation go down in flames, but this one may just pull it out. I wish them the best of luck in their efforts to be good guests. I still think the site needs a blocking feature and better spam moderation, but until then, this might hold the line.
Cheers 🙂
