Written by When people try to put together a mass political migration, it pays to be welcoming. Folks pick up their lives and make a go of it in a new place, presumably because they share the same values, and so you want to go out of your way to make them feel at home. This is done largely in the hope that others will follow.
The obvious downside to this is, people show up with varying agendas and problems. If you’re not careful, they will visit misery on the community and have the opposite effect.
Such was the case recently with two males who called themselves “Ashley and Damon” who came here with malicious intent. They had put together a website dedicated to defaming Freedomain Radio listeners and staff, and had come here to gather information on us as well and disrupt our activities.
Luckily, in the case of Ashley and Damon, they were quickly exposed and run out of town. Unbeknownst to me however, another saboteur had arrived around the same time, and kept a lower profile.
Ethan Glover has been banned from the comments of this blog for months. He was also banned from my Facebook page and blocked on various social media outlets. Ethan fancies himself a blogger, but presumably isn’t very successful, as he thought a good way to advertise his blog would be to spam it all over this one. When I banned one account, he created a new one, until eventually I started banning his IP addresses.
Ethan didn’t appreciate that very much. He went to other places, particularly left libertarian blogs, and told lies about me. One of the lies he told was that I was doing “black hat SEO link building”. A spam tactic that used to trick search engines into giving one higher search rankings. Google long ago figured that tactic out, and began punishing sites that engaged in it. Ethan was very much aware of this, judging by his comments on the other blog.
I called him out as a liar for saying that about me. For one, even if I had done it, he couldn’t possibly have known without some kind of inside information or having seen said link building on his own platforms. Secondly, I had not in fact done so. And third, doing so would not have worked.
Ethan continued to insist he knew I was engaged in this activity despite those facts, and shortly after, someone, presumably him, started building such links to this site. This is what is known as “Negative SEO” a fraudulent vandalism technique where one does malicious things on the internet and attempts to make it look like a rival had done it. A false flag attack, if you will.