I typically don’t post here on weekends because I’m working on articles, behind-the-scenes sausage-making, and spending time in pursuit of happiness with my family, but something came up I thought I need to address immediately, plus the LaPierre story broke after I’d knocked off work yesterday.
Danger, Will Robinson?
I’ve talked before about how this blog and advocacy media are really the only ways I have of sharing links to my articles (aside from asking readers, which has for the most part been historically unreliable). I hope regulars here will agree they get information and insights you won’t get from the “real reporters” who dominate public perceptions (otherwise, why keep coming back?). So I was surprised (and more than a little p!$$ed) to see this reply to my X announcement about my latest AmmoLand article on California Democrat gun-grabbers harassing the “law-abiding” while their criminal constituents get another pass:
Like the man asked, WTF?
I use both Malwarebytes and Webroot, and have never had a problem with AmmoLand (albeit some readers who haven’t figured out ad blockers are prone to grouse about the price of “free”). So I clicked the Bitly link to see what the grievance was, and the only thing that makes “sense” is:
The link may have been reported to Bitly by a member of the public.
That’s it? And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell us who snitched? It’s not like I haven’t had stuff suppressed based on troll complaints before.
Without defining an issue and proving it, URL shortening service and link management platform Bitly is willing to disparage reputations and cast suspicion and fear about visiting websites just on some anonymous person with an unknown agenda’s say-so…?
So is AmmoLand a risky place to go? Not according to Google’s Safe Browsing check (WoG comes up clean as well):
And drive away business? That seems actionable.
So what might be relevant to know about Bitly in trying to untangle this attack suppressing my work? Maybe it’s not about ideology at all?
The link they’re deeming unsafe, with the link shortener beginning “go.shr.lc,” uses Shareaholic (“300,000+ forward-thinking businesses of all sizes rely on our software”), a COMPETITOR of Bitly.
And this may or may not mean something, but the Bitly CEO Toby Gabriner is based in San Francisco. Open Secrets shows he has donated to two candidates over the years, Josh Harder and Catherine Cortez Masto, both Democrats, and if you look at their links, both extremist gun-grabbers advancing Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown agenda.
Now it’s back to X to try to undo the damage.
UPDATE
We are working with Bitly to get these linked unblocked ASAP. [More]
I hope that means you’re going to sue their @$$es if they don’t issue a public apology for reputation damages and compensate for any monetary damages you can determine they’ve caused you and your 300,00 customers by scaring readers away from their content.
Wayne’s World
Former NRA chief Wayne LaPierre misspent gun rights group’s money and owes more than $4M, jury finds [More]
Some are saying being able to put all the blame on Wayne will now work in the Association’s favor in terms of all being forgiven and people coming back.
Not until the rubber stamp board and complicit top officers are replaced.
I’ve been asked to endorse the four “bullet vote” candidates. My response:
Only if they answer my questionnaire correctly.
Crickets. That was two-and-a-half weeks ago.
And this was long before that.
https://bitly.com/pages/about
1. DEI pledges everywhere
2. VP of Engineering in an IT company – a you g woman.
3. The 2nd in the list of management team is a Diversity manager. Reminder: this is an IT company, full of IT directors, customer service managers etc. But they put the diversity commisar nearly on top of the list.
This is an inhuman company.
We use an anti-malware package from Trend Micro in addition to Windows Defender on the machines we haven’t migrated to Linux. Neither package has ever alerted to anything on your site(s) or on AmmoLand. Scans with Malwarebytes haven’t turned up anything that might have “slipped through the cracks” on any of our machines Linux, Windows, or otherwise. As you know, I’m a frequent visitor to both sites and if either was spreading malware I’m pretty sure I would have seen an alert, either in realtime or as a result of our frequently scheduled scans.
But we’ve seen nothing, nada, zilch.
Which leads me to believe what you’re seeing, the warning of a site being “harmful” to visitors, is not a warning about possible malware. It is rather someone’s not so subtle or clever attempt at “thoughtcrime” suppression.