I have previously described my ideas as “virulent” and it would appear that Symantec agrees, as a pair of commenters have noticed problems accessing this blog thanks to their anti-virus software:
Norton 360 AV is blocking this page as a “Fraudulent Web Page”. I had to click through the block page to get here.
Symantec earlier was blocking your site, as well as several alt-right sites, as being “fraudulent.” It wasn’t just you, it was a bunch of birds of a feather, so I suspect something fishy has been going on.
I wonder if this site-blocking may in part explain the sudden and unprecedented 12 percent drop in traffic to VP that took place starting in May 2012, which was the first month since the blog started in 2003 that the traffic didn’t increase year-on-year and seemed particularly strange in light of it being an election year. I had initially assumed the decline was the result of the switch from CoComment to Blogger comments, but it seemed like an extreme reaction, given that there was no similar drop when I made previous commenting system changes, and perhaps more importantly, there was no corresponding decline in Feedburner readers. In fact, last week marked a new Feedburner high.
Has anyone else noticed any similar problems with Symantec products and accessing ideologically transgressive web sites? I’ll shoot an email to Instapundit and perhaps he can let other bloggers know they might want to have a look at their statistics and see if they are being similarly affected. If they, too, are seeing a decline starting around the middle of May, this may be indicative of shenanigans on Symantec’s part.
Just to be clear, I don’t do any phishing or gather any data on anyone visiting here beyond what Blogger and Sitemeter record.