I MUST HAVE UPSET SOMEONE--AGAIN

 

Writing a fisheries conservation blog can be entertaining.

In the nine years since One Angler’s Voyage first appeared, I’ve learned quite a bit about obscure aspects of fisheries science, management, and regulation.  I’ve made the acquaintance of quite a few interesting people, and been invited to speak before a National Academy of Sciences panel.  I’ve picked up a writing gig or two, and lost a few more, as various members of the recreational fishing industry, who apparently believe that having a conservation advocate appear in the angling press was bad for business, tried to make my words go away.

But one of the joys of writing my own blog is that I can write both opinion and facts without worrying about someone pulling the plug because I said something that was deemed politically incorrect by the tackle industry or the for-hire fleet.

In the course of doing just that since early in 2014, I have succeeded in pissing off quite a few people.

The folks in the angling industry get very upset when I tell the public things that the industry doesn’t want them to hear.  I’ve been cursed, threatened, and even had some party boat folks sic a private detective on me, only to find that I pay all my bills, don’t cheat on my wife, and have never been caught committing a crime.

That sort of thing irks an industry that, for many years, has conditioned the angling press—or, probably more precisely, the salt water, non-flyfishing angling press—to never publish anything that might get their readers involved in marine conservation.

They spend a lot of time and effort trying to convince such readers that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which has allowed fishery managers to rebuild over 40 once-overfished stocks, and end overfishing of many more, is somehow bad for fishermen, and also spend a lot of time trying to drive a wedge between anglers and organizations that they deem part of the “environmental industry”—that is, mainstream conservation groups that get involved with marine fisheries issues—even though responsible anglers and conservation organizations share a wide array of common interests. 

Writers who stray from the industry line, and involve themselves in conservation issues, rarely stay writers for very long.  I lost a column in a regional magazine because I opposed a big fishing industry initiative, the so-called Modern Fish Act, a few years ago.  I know other writers who experienced similar fates, simply because they were willing to put their principles above their pocketbooks.

Yet even when writing a blog like this one, some people try to silence your voice.  That’s hard to do on the Internet, which tends to have a very long memory.  Once writings are out on the Web, they tend to stay out there forever. 

There are, however, services that offer to repair electronic reputations, a process that generally involves gaming the algorithms that search engines use to process and present information, so that favorable stories rise to the top of people’s searches, while less complementary information sinks farther down the list, hopefully far enough down that most searchers never see it.

One of the ways to do that, particularly when the information is contained in a blog like this one, which a disgruntled party does not and cannot control, is to manufacture a lot of search engine “hits” on other, somewhat related articles, so that the seemingly more popular items rise in the search engines’ rankings, while the piece they’re trying to suppress appears less relevant and falls farther from the top of the list.

Thus, I knew that I must have touched a nerve about three weeks ago, when blog hits suddenly spiked, and fell into a regular, every-other-day pattern of more-or-less uniform peaks and lows that continued regardless of what topics I addressed in each semi-weekly post.  After more than nine years, I know that normal blog activity just doesn’t take that sort of form.

It was pretty clear that someone was trying to manipulate how the blog interacted with the major search engines.

If I had any doubt that there was intentional interference, all I had to do was look at some other, supporting data.  While I might not be able to see every computer that contacts this blog, I can see, among other things, the web browsers used, the operating systems used, and the country of people accessing the blog’s address.  When I looked at all three of those things, and found that all of the usual increase in blog hits were coming from a person, or perhaps persons, in Singapore, using a Mobile Safari browser on an Android operating system, it becomes pretty clear that someone probably strongly disliked something that I had to say, didn’t want you to read a word of what I had written, and so was trying to hide it.

What was it that caused such consternation?

I can’t be completely sure, but given the timing of the sudden spurt of blog hits, I suspect that the offending article was either “Scare Tactics in the South Atlantic,” which addressed some dishonest angling industry propaganda regarding the region’s red snapper fishery, or a series of pieces on striped bass titled “Diminishing Returns,” “Striped Bass:  Embracing Release Mortality,” and “Some Real Work Will Be Needed to Rebuild Striped Bass,” all of which appeared in the weeks immediately preceeding the unusual and suspicious activity.

Any one of them would have perturbed some elements of the angling industry.

If I had to bet, I’d bet it was one or more of the bass pieces, because the for-hire fleet has been, in general, very opposed to the emergency management measures that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has put in place to reduce striped bass landings to sustainable levels, and has been trying very hard to convince customers that all is well with the stock, urging them to come out and book a few trips right away.

But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was the red snapper piece, and not the bass posts, that triggered the censorship efforts.

Whatever incited the action, the alternate-day spikes of approximately equal volume, which avoid the most recent blog posts and instead seek to elevate older, less immediately controversial essays, make it fairly clear that I wasn’t seeing an unusual, but nonetheless innocent usage pattern.

And it’s highly unlikely that I’m dealing with a hacker.  I get hackers trying to break into the site from time to time, but usually when that happens, the hits are coming from Russia, Moldova, or some similar Eastern European venue, and often from a registered website which, when I click on the link to see what it is (something that I’ve hopefully learned not to do), immediately injects a virus into my system and sends me running to the nearest tech shop for help. 

Singapore, on the other hand, bills itself as a very business- and tourist-friendly nation, with a very active police force and courts that react—even, arguably, overreact—to the slightest violations of local laws.  Those involved in hacking, or any other criminal activity, are likely to seek a far more felon-friendly place to base their operations.

Reputation-defending, on the other hand, could easily originate there.

The fact is, I’ve been the target of reputation-defending operations before.  The first and most notable time was in early November 2016, when I published a post titled “Assessing the Election.”  That post began

“Just last Sunday, I posted a piece speculating on this year’s election, and how it might affect fisheries conservation efforts.  Now, with the big day behind us, the future is clearer, and it looks very bad.

“In fact, it’s hard to imagine it being much worse.”

That post, which quoted heavily from the 2016 Republican platform, was not complementary to Trump or his likely cabinet members, and predicted that his administration would, for the most part, be anti-conservation and pro-exploitation.  That prediction turned out to be true.

The blog drew an immediate response from someone who was clearly close to the Trump team, who wrote things such as

“Knowing some people close to Trump, I am honestly not worried at all.  He wants outdoorsmen, like his children, to be able to enjoy their sport.  Mass media does a great job making people thinking [sic] it’s all hellfire and damnation, but we will be just fine,”

and

“Trump won the GOP nomination by taking on the party elite and their love for endless foreign wars and cheap labor to increase corporate and Wall Street profits (funny, same things Hillary stood for…).  So, I’m not too concerned about Trump following the platform of the very special same special [sic] interests he spent the last year defeating.”

And right about then, the same pattern of high, consistent hit volumes, coming from unusual sources, appeared.  It was clearly an effort to bury my critical predictions of Trump’s approach to fisheries—which proved to be reasonably prophetic—beneath a deluge of other, less political posts.

I was surprised, and complimented in a backhanded way, that someone connected with a victorious national political campaign would go to such efforts to suppress the opinions of a small blog.  But I suppose that they felt obligated to do so because, in the end, the-oft quoted line from the Bible, John 8:32,

“And you will know the truth, that the truth will set you free,”

applies to far more than salvation.

Every time I sit down to write a post for this blog, I do my best to tell you the truth as I understand it to be, linking as many assertions as possible back to a source, so you can do some research on your own if you feel so inclined.  The thought of being fact-checked causes me no trepidation at all.

On the other hand, the Bible did not say, “and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you rich.”  Sometimes, if you’re part of the angling industry, the truth, if applied to fishery management measures, is going to cut into your cash flow, at least in the short term, and when that becomes a possibility, the industry has a history of spinning the facts in favor of immediate profits rather than a fully-enlightened public.

That’s why conservation writers end up on editors’ blacklists, and manufacturers and dealers and the rest of that crowd hire “online reputation managers” to suppress anything that folks write, which they don’t want you to see.

But truth is a mercurial thing, and like mercury, will seek any small gap to set itself loose in the world.