Andrew Anglin

Daily Stormer

November 21, 2014

There is some type of analogy I’m thinking of about someone doing something which is wrong so many times it is eventually right by coincidence, and I totally can’t even remember it. Maybe we can go with “a broken clock is right twice a day.”

Alex Jones is constantly inventing idiot conspiracy theories which make no logical sense unless you accept earlier conspiracies he’s invented. Recently, one of these appeared to actually be true.

Alexa is an Amazon company which keeps track of web traffic through a proprietary browser add-on that users voluntarily install in order to send data to the company. They then use the data to create a ranking system – Google is #1, Facebook is #2, and on it goes.

It is not completely scientific, given that it is a certain type of person, rather than a random selection, which installs the add-on which records traffic. However, it is about as close to a scientific system as is possible. Theoretically.

Generally, the site is viewed by people who run websites, and want to compare their traffic with that of similar sites. Normal web viewers don’t have much interest, as they simply view what they like. As such there appears to be very little reason that Alexa would wish to destroy their own credibility by purposefully manipulating the ranking system for political ends and rendering the system itself a complete joke which can never be taken seriously again.

Yet this appears to be exactly what they did in October of this year.

Observe these screenshots provided by Infowars.

Conservative(ish) sites:

Liberal sites:

Surely, the entire technology community must be outraged by this.

Why they would do something so obvious, and so fraudulent that it is probably in some way illegal, is unclear. As the general public is not monitoring Alexa, it almost appears as though the purpose was to demoralize people who run right-wing websites. But why then attack all of these mainstream sites?

I don’t know. What I do know is that no one has updated the Alexa Wiki entry to include information about this scandal.