During the past couple of weeks, liberal news sites such as the New York Times, Washington Post and The Guardian have been boasting about the massive jump in traffic due to their new subscribers. However, online metrics revealed that this traffic boost mainly came from China, a country with strict laws about using the Internet.
Through the data gathered by Vessel News using Alexa, a company that tracks website analytics, it was revealed that these three news site experience a huge volume of traffic from December 2016 to February this year. After tracing the geographic source of the traffic, it was revealed that a bulk of this came from China.
For instance, in December, the traffic that NY Times received from China was 5.1 percent. But, data from earlier this week shows that this has jumped to 49.2 percent. Aside from the fact that the traffic increased significantly in just a matter of months, another intriguing factor is NY Times’ current status in China. Since 2012, the news site has been one of the websites blocked in China.
Aside from NY Times, the Washington Post and The Guardian also greatly benefitted from the traffic they received from China. Although these websites are not blocked in the country, the boost is still surprising especially since these sites had little to no traffic in China back in December. Now, however, they are enjoying a boost in traffic by over 50 percent.
One particular explanation behind this bizarre occurrence is that all three site are benefitting from China’s bot servers that generate high volume of traffic through automated clicks. Offering this type of service to these news site could be one of China’s way of attacking President Donald Trump.
After all, China has been a vocal critic of Trump ever since he became president. By providing automated traffic to the NY Times, The Guardian and Washington Post, China is able to provide the necessary support to these sites to enable them to continue releasing fake news stories and reports that are heavily biased against Trump.
