Is China Watching You? We Know They’re Watching Us!

By Bob Sparrow

Several months ago, we started seeing a significant spike in the hits to our blog. We thought, Yippee!! More people are finally starting to follow us. As a reference we usually get between 50 and 100 hits on Monday, the day each new blog posts. The count typically decreases as we get further into the week.  Recently we started to see hits in the hundreds, which, of course, we attributed to our spectacular writing. But then the hit numbers jumped to the thousands; our biggest one-day hit was over 4,000. We finally realized, we’re not THAT good of writers! So, I Googled what causes a spike like this and of course, Google had the answer, several of them in fact:

In terms of possible ‘positive’ reasons it said:

1. You may be doing some successful marketing.  No
2.  An influencer or news source may have mentioned or linked to your blog. No way
3. Your blog may contain content of specific interest to those who go to the effort of using a Virtual Private Network. Huh?  No
4. You have a growing audience in a foreign country. Hell No

Since none of those answers seemed reasonable, I asked Google what some of the ‘negative’ reasons might be for this increase in hits. The short answer was:

The most likely cause of an unprompted and large influx of traffic from a specific country is bot activity. In recent years, China has been a significant source of malicious web bots. This bot traffic is often not from genuine users and could be a sign of security threats. 

So, what is a bot? A computer program that performs automatic tasks.

As I was learning about bots, I looked further into Google Analytics that support our blog to see where in the world these hits to our blog were coming from. Past analytics for this data would show that the majority of our hits come from the U.S., followed by the some from the United Kingdom and then a few scattered around the globe from places like Brazil, Australia, South Africa and other countries. Currently our analytics showed two things, 1) China by far had the most hits – in the thousands, and 2) the hits were mostly on one particular blog, Suzanne’s Loyalist or Patriot? that she wrote in July 2023. Why that particular blog? Interestingly enough, is about Ben Franklin’s son, William, who, while his father was busy helping the U.S. break away from England, William remained a loyalist to the crown and ultimately moved to England to live out his life and never spoke to his father again. If you’re interested in reading or re-reading, her entire blog, go to our Archives on the right and click on July 2023.

So, what is the Chinese’s fascination with this story that shows an iconic American family divided over which country to support? Of all the blogs we’ve written over the past 13 years, this one about divided patriotism is the one they’re hitting. They could just as easily have landed on her blog about Dash the Wonder Dog. OK, maybe not, but it’s just a little spooky that the Chinese have a particular interest in that blog. And why does the bot keep hitting it?

So, I’ve done a little research into ‘bot protection’ and while there are some good programs out there that would hopefully eliminate the bots, I’m a little hesitant as I don’t want to lose thousands of our readers. But I will caution you that if you ever comment on our blog, make sure you’re not saying anything that will jeopardize our national security.