Back in May, Cas Mudde wrote a characteristically good op-ed for the Guardian, which asked a very reasonable question: why are politicians, the media and the general public so obsessed with young men’s (alleged) shift to the radical right whilst ignoring young women’s much clearer shift to the (radical) left? In this article, Cas very kindly pointed to an old chapter of mine on the sociology of radical right voters.
The Guardian’s online team linked this reference to the free pre-print that is still available here on this website, which in turn send an absolutely astounding (by my standards) number of visitors this way.
Nice, but I only learned about this when I received a much smaller, but still largish number of pingbacks, which popped up in my moderation queue. Pingbacks are automatic comments created when one blogging site links to another. In the Internet’s happier days, they were common. Now, they are a rarity, because they were abused for generating link/comment spam. I still have them enabled (I’m nostalgic like that), but before May, I had not seen one of them in years.
These pingbacks came from websites around the globe, which had published articles that were (often translated and sometimes back-translated) verbatim copies of Cas Mudde’s piece in the Guardian that even included the link to my site, which explains the pingbacks.
On closer inspection, everything on these sites is scraped from elsewhere. Put differently, these are (at least superficially) not sites that spread fake news, but fake news sites. The fact that this happened in parallel and just hours (sometimes minutes) after the original Guardian article went online suggests that these are cheap, automated operations.
To make this even more confusing, the article that they stole from the Guardian disappeared rather quickly in most cases. The links they tried to place on my site as comment spam lead to 404s now.
So what is the point of this? Is this low-key ad-fraud? Is there Chinese or Russian disinformation lurking within all the stolen content? Are they trying to establish these “sites” as bases for future disinformation operations?
Everything is possible, but I don’t think that these sites get any visitors, anyway, so once more: What is the point? I have no idea.
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