For you non-bloggers, the “dashboard” is like home base
where I go to post new entries; edit my content; change the layout, theme, style
or appearance; read any comments my readers leave; check my earnings (if I had
any, which I don’t); and view my audience by the day, week, month, year or
all-time.
As of this morning, the shieldWALL
has been viewed more than 16,000 times since I started it in 2016. This is only
a partial count, because the dashboard shows only the top 10 countries where
people are reading what I write. Here’s what’s interesting about my audience:
* As you might expect, the largest number of readers – 14,001 –
are in the United States.
* In second place, remarkably, is Russia, with 917 page views,
followed by Ukraine with 305.
At first I was taken aback by the fact that so many Russians
and Ukranians are reading my political essays and other social and environmental
commentary, but then I started to think about it and it makes perfect sense to
me.
First off, these statistics do not show that 917 individual
Russians wake up every morning and eagerly run to their devices to find out what
former journalist Scott Shields has to say about the U.S. government, Fairmont
City Council, the state of West Virginia or even the Major League All-Star Game
or how much my dog likes Christmas.
What it does suggest to me is that someone – maybe one person or
five people or a whole room full of Russian hackers, bot-creators and Putin-endorsed
trolls – have software programs that send them a notification every time any
American posts the name “Donald Trump” on Facebook or in an internet blog. I can’t prove this, but I’d
bet a proper sum of money that it’s true.
If I’m right, this is scary stuff. I mean, if the Russians are
diving deep enough into the American political swamp to get all the way
down to me – a lowly part-time blogger in tiny Fairmont, West Virginia – just imagine
the volume of information they must be collecting from every American with a
political agenda and a Facebook account.
We know the Russians hacked into the 2016 election and are
doing it again for the mid-terms, and we know they are creating bogus “people” with
actual accounts so they can plant bogus comments on Facebook, Twitter and
probably every other social media platform where they can distort reality,
cause anger and hatred among various groups of people and chip away at our democracy
by sowing the seeds of discontent.
And now I know if they are reading what I write, it must be
so much easier for them than any of us imagined. I’m sure they aren’t just
reading my blog but also every comment I make – and everyone else makes – in any
public Facebook forum. I almost always make my Timeline comments “public” on
the off chance that some Trumpaloon will read them, see the wisdom of my logic
and come to his or her senses, but deep down I know that will never happen, so
I think I’ll stop doing that today, switch to “friends only” and see what
effect that has on my Russian readership statistics going forward.
In the meantime, I want to add that Donald Trump has been prone
to give the Russians a pass on their election interference while also blaming
the Chinese and Koreans and some 400-pound man in his mother’s basement. For
the record, neither China nor Korea made the Top 10 list of shieldWALL readers, and if there’s a
400-pound hacker out there, odds are he’s in one of these 10 places:
United States, 14,001
Russia, 917
Ukraine, 305
Germany, 257
France, 147
Poland, 143
Unknown Region, 140
Portugal, 139
United Kingdom, 112
Canada, 110.
That’s my complete audience list as it appears on the
dashboard. Most of it is no real surprise, but I never knew I was so popular in
Portugal. Now that I do, let me close this essay by saying, “Hello, Lisbon.
Thanks for reading. Gotta say I love your water dogs, but your Man of War…not
so much. Say hi to Spain for me.”
Over and out.
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