about that tumblr russian psyop email

Submitted by musou in just_post

posted this on my blog over there as well but i know some of y'all are on tumblr as well so i figured i'd post it here too...

so, after getting the russian psyop warning email last night, i spent the morning hacking together a script to scan every single post on my blog for any posts originating from any of the authors listed in the email. here’s what i learned:

  1. there are definitely no posts from any of the authors listed in the warning email anywhere on my blog. this almost certainly means the email was sent erroneously to people who weren’t affected or involved in any way.

  2. tumblr’s oauth implementation (and really just oauth in general) sucks major ass when you’re writing a command line client. my goal in writing my program was to make something that would be very easy to use by non-technical people, and since all it really needs to do is spit out a list of posts (or nothing) there’s no reason to give it a graphical interface at all. 3-step oauth with out-of-band callbacks requires WAY more setup and technical know-how to use with a command line application than a non-technical user will be comfortable with. basically, if i want to make this usable by most people, then i need to write a webapp around the whole thing, buy a domain name, and pay for hosting. that’s not something i can justify doing for a tool that will be used at most once for any given user. and since the API limits fetching posts from a blog to 50-at-a-time, it would exhaust the rate limit after scanning only two blogs the size of mine, and i know others have blogs way larger than mine.

so if anyone’s freaking out about their entire online life being a lie because they got an email, don’t worry. if none of the author names listed in the email were instantly familiar to you, then you probably weren’t even supposed to get the email in the first place.

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neku wrote

so if anyone’s freaking out about their entire online life being a lie because they got an email

nah its cool i knew i was a russian psyop

a script to scan every single post on my blog for any posts originating from any of the authors listed in the email

i think you get the email if you liked a post from one of those blogs too so :/

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musou OP wrote (edited )

yeah its hard for me to give a shit about this sort of thing, because those blogs were just posting the same stuff you could find from real people a thousand other places. but it bothered me that i got the email and couldn't find what posts in question triggered it.

i didnt think about checking likes though, ill hack some more and see if there's anything in there. i hand out likes on that site like throwing confetti, same way i do on every site, so its entirely possible.

EDIT: i hit the rate limit so i will have to finish checking tomorrow but there was no matches in the first 49850 of my liked posts

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toasthaste wrote

I definitely did reblog a few of them, but it was because they were big ole lies an photoshops an such that got thousands and thousands of notes, and I reblogged occasional people pointing out that they were a big bunch of bullshit. But since I know I did that, I have no idea if I also uncritically reblogged some other ones of them ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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devtesla wrote

I'm fairly sure they've removed it from not just the russian blogs but every reblog as well.

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musou OP wrote

in the email they said they deleted the original posts but not the reblog chains, but it wouldn't be the first time they fucked up something like that, if thats the case

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Moonside wrote

I suspect it's some difficulty on the part of Tumblr since that happens with deleted Tumblr blogs as well.

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