#hustleinatrap

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not a dossier (yet)

I've started digging into the archive.org history of several of the blogs on the Russian tampering list - started with the one I best remember seeing before (blackness-by-your-side). Hustleinatrap, ghettablasta, and swagintherain (possibly others) were part of a reblog cluster with this blog.

Some observations so far:

The blogging style seems to mostly consist of pulling stuff from other social media/news sites that lots of people are likely to agree with, and adding vehement comments.

It is obvious that there's something "off" about the linguistic style when you pay close attention. How many actual Black Americans do you know that don't understand the use of definite and indefinite articles in English? (Speaking of which, "hustle in a trap" already stood out to me, but I assumed it was a Tumblr dialect mutation before this.)

Some of the work they were doing was very subtle, and burying it in a hail of posts that mostly everybody agreed with was a very good cover strategy.

There's a weird aesthetic similarity between them.

Some of these blogs have what look like SEO posts about random topics in between the political ones. How do you do, fellow American humans?

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Analysis in progress, part 1: 4mysquad, ghettablasta, blackness-by-your-side, swagintherain, hustleinatrap, melanin-diary/jusslittlestoner, mooseblogtimes, the-real-eye-to-see

Don’t panic if you liked or reblogged actual activist content posted by these people - for the most part it’s real activist content, it’s just stolen.

This is another example of white people deliberately and maliciously stealing credit for the work of (mostly) black activists and using that work to advance their own causes.

These blogs have very little genuine original content, and most of what exists is comments on other people’s photos, Twitter threads or articles. Reverse image search usually reveals the original of anything that seems to originate there. Their content is generally either reblogged or reposted without credit, and many of their popular posts are reposts without credit.

Most of these blogs begin with SEO posts and/or generic content tagged with “follow4follow” and similar tags, when you go back far enough - or they simply start by funneling content from the other blogs. This is called “generating a content web” in SEO, or search engine optimization; it creates false legitimacy.

Many have an activity spike in March 2016 according to the capture record.

Irregularities in language patterns are noticeable. Ghettablasta has the most obvious Russian diction patterns.

There are also several instances of “tone-deaf” interaction with American politics - for example, a cartoon concerning “Clinton emails” that breaks the flow of the blog content around it, and there’s a post from blackness-by-your-side which is a gifset taking a potshot at “political correctness”, which was reblogged by swagintherain. I think the Russian agents running these blogs thought the gifset was celebrating what it was mocking. There are several other pieces of right-wing humor posted without tone-awareness. The earliest capture of the-real-eye-to-see has an anti-Obamacare cartoon, for example.

In most cases the first capture of each blog is from mid to late 2015. Blackness-by-your-side starts in early 2015 (as ufo-pilot-and-his-sexy-spouse) and switches URLs in late 2016; none start earlier than 2015 except for mooseblogtimes and the-real-eye-to-see which are late 2014. Swagintherain and hustleinatrap both have a first recorded capture time of August 2015, suggesting they were begun at the same time.

In most cases the last capture of each blog is in 2017. The blogs seem to have mostly bailed out before Tumblr shut them down.

Here are some imgur albums showing screenshots of the types of things I’m discussing here:

SEO, generic content and Russian grammar

Tone-deaf content

Some other extended notes below the cut, documenting stolen content and other errata.

Stolen Content

Here’s a reblog of a post from 4mysquad, displaying a photoset of graffiti:

https://sxmbatheking.tumblr.com/post/115100766722/monaxty-4mysquad-justice-for-africa

This post was found via a March 8th, 2015 crawl of 4mysquad by the Wayback Machine. (https://web.archive.org/web/20150308185219/http://4mysquad.tumblr.com/)

I did a reverse image search (https://reverse.photos) and found the original source, posted on March 5th.

I documented elsewhere the stolen source of a popular “alternatives to police” post.

Here’s a post from ghettablasta, reblogged by swagintherain, which is cribbed from a press post and a kickstarter.

There are many other examples. Basically I haven’t been able to find very much that’s not sourced elsewhere. If the few early original posts on “mooseblogtimes” are any example, it’s because when they try to compose original sentences they break cover.

Notes on Blackness-by-your-side

Blackness-by-your-side is tricky to background-check because it changed its name from “ufo-pilot-and-his-sexy-spouse” in 2016 right around the election. It was also HIGHLY prolific in reblogging and it used an “infinite scrolling” style after the changeover, meaning that the individual archive snapshots only show a fraction of its content. I was able to load somewhat more in the mobile site than in the regular one.

For a bit there I thought that it had just come on the scene late and reblogged from other blogs, but no - its early posts hold to the pattern and even use a Russian language style. Here’s the earliest capture. The style changed between the July 2015 and August 2015 captures.

Notes on mooseblogtimes

This one is interesting because if you look at its early content, it’s WAY more transparently Russian-biased, before they started trying to conceal things. For example, its first few posts include an anti-gay meme and a post making fun of a large black woman.

Later on, it changes and gets slightly better at emulating social activist styles, and you can see the other blogs reblogging from it.