From Blogger to Information Saboteur (Based on Real Events)
I first meant to write this article back in 2013. I gathered plenty of material and saved a huge pile of drafts, but something kept holding me back. Today, though, I think it is exactly the kind of thing that matters most to people who have nothing to do with running a blog or building traffic for a news site. What follows is an attempt to show from the inside one of the ways people’s emotions and opinions get manipulated through news sites. If I, an amateur working alone, could build a machine for manipulating opinion, what does that say about the people who do it for a living?
So, here we go:
The beginning
Back in 2010, a friend from university and I decided to start our own news sites. We were in our final year, and for us this was part experiment, part contest: we bet on who could grow his site faster. We built the sites on WordPress, which was free, and each of us had his own approach to promotion. We started out writing our own news pieces on all sorts of subjects and padded them out with items copied from existing online outlets.
The tactic I chose was automatic cross-posting of news headlines to Twitter, and I signed my friends and their friends up to follow the account. Within a month my publication’s Twitter account had more than 2,000 followers, half of them bots that rebroadcast the headlines on their own sites, but that helped me a great deal. Over the next few months I settled at a steady 120 visits a month.
It was interesting to watch the page statistics and work out where the traffic came from. At some point I saw the problem: I could not keep anyone on the site. People opened the page they had arrived on from a search engine or Twitter, read the story and closed the site. To fix that I started showing teasers for related stories. Once I had hooked the free plugin I needed into WordPress, preparing a story for publication meant tagging it with a set of keywords. For a story about “Euro 2012”, say, I would enter: Donetsk, Poland, Lviv, Kyiv, Euro 2012, Football, Sport. From then on, when a reader landed on a story, the right-hand side of the page showed teasers for stories with similar keywords and subjects. If someone came in on “Fire in the town of N”, there is a fair chance other incidents in that town or country will interest them. With that in place I held 40% of visitors on the site, and they went as deep as four articles in. In other words, people read the teasers and the teasers worked. It was a success, but not a victory.
Data analysis is the key to success
As I kept digging into the statistics, new referrers turned up: mail.ru, gmail.com, vkontakte.ru, odnoklassniki.ru and so on. Mail services and social networks, in other words — and I was not advertising on any of them and had no cross-posting set up there, which meant people had started sharing the links themselves. That pushed the site to 500 visitors on a weekday and 200 at weekends. On some days it reached 800.
The next goal was to climb the search rankings, so that someone typing a query would land on my article. I re-read the documentation on optimisation and promotion and found the key point: search engines use a filtering system. Roughly speaking, a site earns points for meeting the search engine’s requirements. Above all, it must not be buried in advertising, and that went double for young sites, under six months old. It must not carry banned content or “adult” content (adult sites deserve an article of their own). It must have a robots.txt file in its root (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Стандарт_исключений_для_роботов), and one of the most important elements was a sitemap.xml file.
sitemap.xml is an XML file for search engines that holds the tree of your site. It is there to make life easier for the search bots that visit you. Instead of spending time crawling your site for links to other pages, they open the map you have given them and load the information from those sources.
So I had met the three main requirements of the search engines:
- No advertising on the site
- A bots.txt file in place
- A sitemap.xml site map in place
Some time later I added a fourth rule: an article should carry no more than 3 active links to other sites. If you publish a story and want to point to several sites in the text, turning a word or phrase into a link, bear in mind that too many links can look like paid advertising to a search engine, and the page will be pushed down the rankings. Two weeks of these simple changes took the site to 1,000 visitors on a working day and 600 at weekends.
It is worth saying that I was not writing original articles. Or rather, original articles ran to one or two a month. Everything else was straight plagiarism: content copied from news sites with a credit to the source at the foot of the article.
What I had so far was small, I wanted more, but I still did not want to spend time writing my own pieces. Digging further into the search traffic, I found that political and social stories drew the most visits. Those subjects never went out of season, and in politics people would even go hunting for old material. Obituaries did extremely well in search. If I ran a story about a celebrity’s death, it came back to life a year later, on the anniversary of the death and for five days after. If the story was about a film actor, it picked up again every time one of his films aired on a main channel with him in the lead.
I settled on a few categories of news and worked them hard:
- Politics;
- Obituaries;
- Scandals;
- Social topics.
I tried to run at least one story in each category every day (obituaries aside, that section filled up as the news came in). That took the site to 1,500-2,000 visitors a day.
The social effect
One fine day I did something that made my hosting provider call me in person to tell me the load on the site was insane and I would have to change tariff plan. The indirect cause was the social network “VKontakte”. It so happened that at the time this hugely popular network suddenly stopped working across various regions of our country and abroad. Twitter has always been the fastest rumour mill going, so I checked the #vkontakte hashtag to see what people were saying. Posts were claiming the network had shut down for good, that there were eyewitnesses who had seen FSB officers carrying servers out of the company’s office, and so on. Without thinking twice, I wrote a story on my site under the headline “Why VKontakte is down” and published a short note based on the rumours from Twitter. Within 30 minutes that story turned my site upside down. Google and Yandex trusted the site by then, so they indexed the story fast, and because none of the official media had got round to writing about it, every worried user searching “Why VKontakte is down” landed on my note, and the site came out top of the results. In the first hour the site took more than 13,000 visitors and my hosting provider had to call and tell me about the overload and the need to change tariff plan. Over the course of the day the total came to more than 60,000 people. People read the story, commented on it and forwarded it to friends. Best of all, the media picked it up and linked back to my site. Which gave me one more rule:
To lift a site up the search rankings, it needs live links pointing to it from high-ranking pages. Those are the official sites of media outlets, Wikipedia, the corporate sites of global brands and so on.
Traffic to that story came in from the USA to China, but most of it came from Russia and Ukraine. In the comments people started talking to each other and sharing their problems. Some raised the trouble they had with company policies blocking access to social networks, and along came the advisers, recommending proxy servers, or anonymisers.
The information saboteur
Comments – this one feature turned out to be so important that everything I did with the site from then on was built around it.
Watching how readers behaved in the comments, I noticed that stories on social and political subjects very often set them arguing. Stories that started an argument in the comments pulled in a far bigger audience than anything else. So I drew my conclusions and decided to concentrate on finding and publishing the sharpest political and social stories I could — the ones where opinion split hard. Not that people hurried to comment on everything I published. The traffic told me readers were interested: I could see the story being shared on social networks, direct visits were up (which meant the link was going round in a messenger such as Skype), yet nothing was happening on the page. That is when I first tried a tactic I called “the Provocateur”. As site Administrator, some time after publishing a story I would post a “bait” comment under the name of a visitor who did not exist, putting the view of one group, and a little later a comment from another visitor backing the other group. The second comment was addressed to the first, to get the argument going. That is how my personality split three ways and I acquired a cast of regular commenters: Nikolai and Vladimir, later joined by Vasily, who would back one or the other as the mood took him. The effect of those “bait” comments was astonishing. Activity went straight off the scale. Readers simply could not resist putting in their own “two cents” and siding with one of my avatars. Before long the commenters had forgotten what started it all, and the thread turned into a stream of argument and abuse. There were days when the comments ran past 40 pages, at 50 comments a page.
One of the hottest topics, for instance, was Euro 2012. Ahead of it I published a story with provocative criticism of the volunteer movement in Donetsk. I laid into volunteers who were going to work for free for an oligarchic structure. Sure enough, the first in-house comments appeared under the article, and 20 minutes later the story was being argued over in earnest. A few days later the site’s official mailbox had a letter from the Euro-12 organisers in Donetsk, proposing a meeting to talk the situation over; they offered to show me everything and explain it, so that I would change my mind and rewrite the article in a more positive light. Naturally I did not reply, my interest was purely in the experiment.
Building that site up, I felt the true power of information. How information can stir up raw bursts of emotion in people, and how, if you want, that emotion can be pointed anywhere you like. These days the same activity has a name: information terrorism. My tactic was to look for stories that sat on a social fault line. They were very easy to find, because there is always a group that thinks differently from the rest. The catch is that the dissenting group can be so small it gets shouted down at once, and the story stops being relevant. My job was to pick the stories where the people thinking differently were roughly equal in number to the people thinking “correctly”. Then it was hard to say which side was right, because the forces were evenly matched. On a small scale, in the information space, a civil conflict was being stoked.
Today the manipulation patterns that helped me build the traffic of my news site are widely used to manipulate people at state level in many countries. The model fits the machinery of government easily enough, provided the leading media are “motivated” to present things in the required light. Unfortunately, the results do not always stop at people insulting one another online; they can spill over into real social conflict.
The effect a stream of information has on the human mind is enormous. The strange part is that we never notice ourselves becoming a weapon in the hands of the people manipulating it. So it is worth watching for the signs: if your opinion lines up exactly with that of your neighbour on the left, if the two of you speak in the same phrases and slogans and your beliefs are the polar opposite of your neighbour’s on the right, who fanatically repeats a different set of stock phrases – “STOP RIGHT THERE!”(c) – then in all likelihood you have all been manipulated.
Back to my site: in time I put some unobtrusive advertising on it and ran paid articles from the Miralinks exchange, and it started paying for itself. By 2013 I no longer had the time to look after it and the site was sold. At the point of sale it was doing 6,000-10,000 visitors a day and held 15,000 articles. Since that experience I have had more than one offer to advise on growing similar online publications, ones that are well known today.
