A new troll technique - VERY nasty!

[hedgehog]

The National Catholic reporter is a very reputable newspaper much despised in right wing Catholic circles because it doesn't trumpet the Party line. Since yesterday, if you go to that site, you get a warning that it has been flagged as containing malware. The site for the Association of Irish Priests had a similar problem. Apparently, if enough people flag a site as containing malware, it will trip a notice from Firefox and Google Chrome.

cross-post from Meta - maybe this kind of attack has been around for a while, but it's new to me!

[dipsydoodle]

1. Sneaky

[TexasTowelie]

5. I've had some battles on a RW blog spot on the Website of a small local newspaper

that supposedly is politically impartial. The problem is that the Webmaster consistently favors RW bloggers and went as far as to obstruct liberals from posting opinions.

My solution to their bias was to go the Wikipedia page of the newspaper and point to the various blogs and comments that the editor allowed to remain (including racist and homophobic articles). We engaged in a cyber-war as my comments were undone and then I would reverse the edit so my comments were reposted. One of the greatest assets any business possesses is there reputation and they couldn't risk losing their readership or ad sponsors so a truce was finally called and is currently being maintained.

Back to your story--it is disgusting that tricks like this occur but IOKIYAR!

[RKP5637]

2. You know, I've seen that occur before on some sites and I wondered WTF. I can't

recall the exact sites now, but when it occurred I wondered why. As I recall they were some progressive LGBT sites and I bet that's what was going on ... trolled by a different group, like NOM or something.

The RW always resorts to cheating, bullying and thuggery behavior.

[nanabugg]

3. That's the only way they can win. Never in a fair fight.. nt

[RKP5637]

4. So true. And around here they steal many of the election signs for

democrats out of people's yards. And it was last election an opposing republican candidate was filmed tearing down a large democratic sign for his opponent. They are such a bunch of cheats, bullies and liars.

[TexasTowelie]

7. That sounds like Rep. Pete Sessions from the DFW area.

Caught red-handed and issued a citation for removing the campaign signs of his opponents.

[RKP5637]

8. Yep, same thing, I think the one I'm referring to was in Missouri as

I recall, yep, same type of individual.

[-..__...]

6. I have Firefox and Avast installed...

I went to that site and it has "a good rating based on based on many votes" (on the Google page),

and it has a "good rating based on a small number of votes" (on the NCR homepage).

Seems to me that if there was a deliberate attempt to discredit the site, the 'trolls" would be neg repping the shit out of it.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

9. There has to be a technological fix for this problem of politically motivated false malware reports

for this problem of politically motivated false malware reports.

If the webmasters of targeted sites had an easy way to complain to Google about false malware reports, then Google could run its own sophisticated scans of the site and remove the false reports.

Is Google aware of the problem?