There are some metrics attached to a blog, so I can look at numbers and graphs to see how many people come here and when, etc. I also get an email letting me know when someone new registers on the blog.
It’s been a long time since there’s been anything in the way of emails received, so I took notice one day when a surge of them hit my inbox. From one or two every year, I logged 30 new registrations in a day. That’s weird, I thought. Better check it out, I thought. Then a little bird flew by.
The next day, there were scores of hits. The day after, hundreds. Still too disengaged to look into the blog administration files, I puzzled about what could be going on. There was, like, zero chance that anything I’d ever said here went viral or merited the sort of overnight sensation I seemed to have caused. It had to be something else.
Ah, yes. The election. This was about the time that the Russian troll farms were inundating American cyber-life with their mind pollution. Within the course of about a week, this sad little journal was hit by more than 800 suspicious characters, all inexplicably interested in knowing what I was going to say next. Almost 700 of them were following me. A lot of their email addresses ended in “mail.ru” and “spamavert.com”, but a disturbing number of them were everyday American domains. Deeply disturbing.
And the blog wasn’t all. I found myself being tracked on Facebook by dozens of people with unpronounceable names, sometimes using alphabets I didn’t even recognize.
Jesus, a girl can’t even think out loud in private anymore.