Anonymous commenters – what’s their agenda?

The nameless ones: spammers, professional  trolls, the CCA and the others

By Will Collette

Tom Ferrio and I were talking the other day about anonymous commenters. I mentioned that one of the new growth areas for jobs is in the field of becoming a professional blog commenter. Companies hire you to cruise the internet and post comments on various blogs and websites.

Tom pointed out that, actually, a lot of those jobs are overseas. Public relations firms hire people in India and elsewhere. The PR flaks write some blurbs that these foreign workers then use to try to get the name placement of various companies’ websites on as many blogs as possible. It’s part of a cyber-age phenomenon called “search engine optimization (SEO).” Get the website mentioned on lots of websites and your placement in a Google search will go up. Until Google realizes that it’s all a ploy.

But that's just part of it.

Progressive Charlestown gets a LOT of anonymous comments – most of them are filtered by Google (which runs Blogger, the software we use). These are clearly in the category of outsourced – and sometimes funny – efforts to get us to run a comment plugging somebody’s website.

Here is an actual comment of this genre we received on January 31^st: 

“Unquestionably believe that which you said. Your favorite season appeared to be on the net the simplest thing to be aware of. ӏ say to you, I definitely get annoyed while people consides worsies that they just ԁo not know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and also defined out the whole thing without having side-effects, people can take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thanks Also see my site: how to stop snoring www.XXXXXXX”

Thank you, Anonymous, because it’s always Progressive Charlestown’s goal to hit the nail upon the top. And without side effects.

We also get a number of anonymous comments that work straight out of right-wing talking points – a number came in virtually quoting the NRA’s news releases in response to our gun control articles. During campaign season, we received a number that looked like they were sponsored by the national Republican Party. We know the Republican state party was paying pretty close attention to us.

Those comments seemed to originate from the United States, written by English-as-primary-language writers. So, to the extent that they were from American trolls, we’re glad to aid the economy recovery through job creation.

There was some media attention, especially within progressive circles, to the Republicans use of professional commenters and trolls, phony Facebook friends, etc. in rather awkward attempts to try to spin social media in their direction.

The worst in this genre are the professional trolls. Their job was not only to get party line comments published on left-wing blogs, but to pick fights to distract and divert the bloggers. In some instances, the professional troll’s compensation was based on how many times they actually got intense on-line fights going.

This particular kind of professional commenting was used as a sub-sub-plot in HBO’s terrific new series, The News Room.

Click here for a first-hand account of what it’s like to work as a professional internet troll.

If this sounds like the job for you, here are examples of links to job openings to become a professional internet blog commenter (attention, Mike Chambers): here, here, here, here, and here.

Then we get a lot of anonymous local commenters, mostly mouthing the Charlestown Citizens Alliance line, and usually trying to start a fight. 

Most of them seem to come from the same three or four people. They use a very generic screen name - "Jerry" was a popular handle for a while. Their writing styles generally line up with what you can read in the mostly anonymous blow-hard section of the CCA website.

There was one notable case where we received multiple anonymous and semi-anonymous comments attacking us that seemed to misunderstand the correct meaning of a word. Then a signed article with the same misunderstanding appeared on the CCA website. Ah-ha! When that was pointed out, the CCA article was quietly edited within hours.

We get other anonymous comments of various stripes – some interesting, some just plain stupid. Some with racist or homophobic rants - those go straight into the spam can. Others with unsubstantiated charges against somebody or other in town.

Each of the Progressive Charlestown writers deals with commenters on their articles in their own way. Within our group, I am the most likely to send an anonymous comment to the spam can unless I find it amusing or interesting.

So far, we have published more than 3,400 comments and have rejected just under 800, almost all of them anonymous and likely originating either from professional right-wing PR firms or the CCA or whack jobs - sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. That’s not counting all the hundreds of crazy ones like the “how to stop snoring” example I gave earlier on.

You are far more likely to get published in Progressive Charlestown if (a) you sign your name and (b) back up what you say.

But generally speaking, all of us at Progressive Charlestown believe that if you won’t stand by your convictions and sign what you write, then STFU. We put our names on the stuff we write here and I’ll continue to label anonymous commenters who won’t do the same “chicken shit”.