Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 9:52 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend Steve Goldstein.  DLH]

> Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex
The Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News
by Samanth Subramanian
Feb 15 2017
<https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/>

The first article about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described
how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man
in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course.
Boris had found the article somewhere online, and he needed to feed his
web­site, Daily Interesting Things, so he appropriated the text, down to
its last mis­begotten comma. He posted the link on Facebook, seeding it
within various groups devoted to American politics; to his astonish­ment,
it was shared around 800 times. That month—February 2016—Boris made more
than $150 off the Google ads on his website. Considering this to be the
best possible use of his time, he stopped going to high school.

Boris isn’t his real name. He prefers the anonymity because he doesn’t want
to break ranks with the other people in his town of Veles, in the Balkan
nation of Macedonia. Nobody here wants to dwell on Trump anymore. Veles has
the feel of a small community clamming up out of a suspicion that it’s
being talked about for all the wrong reasons.

In the final weeks of the US presidential election, Veles attained a weird
infamy in the most powerful nation on earth; stories in The Guardian and on
BuzzFeedrevealed that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the registered home
of at least 100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with
sensationalist, utterly fake news. (The imminent criminal indictment of
Hillary Clinton was a popular theme; another was the pope’s approval of
Trump.) The sites’ ample traffic was rewarded handsomely by automated
advertising engines, like Google’s AdSense. An article in The New
Yorkerdescribed how President Barack Obama himself spent a day in the final
week of the campaign talking “almost obsessively” about Veles and its
“digital gold rush.”

Within Veles itself, the young entrepreneurs behind these websites became
subjects of tantalizing intrigue. Between August and November, Boris earned
nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites. The average monthly salary
in Macedonia is $371.

Boris is 18 years old, a lean, slouching youth with gray eyes, hair mowed
close to his skull, and the rudiments of a beard. When he isn’t smoking a
cigarette, he’s lighting one. He listens to a lot of gangsta rap: the
Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, Wu-Tang Clan; after watching Notorious, the
2009 biopic of B.I.G., he decided he would like to visit Brooklyn, a New
York City borough he imagines overrun more by gangsters than hipsters. He
is an affable raconteur, with a droll sense of humor and a clear-eyed view
of himself and his town. Someday he wants to leave Veles, because of how
little there is to do. You can live with your parents and have them pay for
your evenings in a bar, or you can bus tables in a café. If you’re a gym
rat, you might work security. A few factories on the outskirts of town
still offer regular employment, but nothing lavish. “We can’t make money
here with a real job,” Boris says. “This Google AdSense work is not a real
job.”

At best, Boris’ English is halting and fractured—certainly not good enough
to turn out five to 10 articles about Trump and Clinton every day for weeks
on end. Fortunately for him, the election summoned forth the energies of
countless alt-right websites in the US, which manufactured white-label
falsehoods disguised as news on an industrial scale. Across the spectrum of
right-wing media—from Trump’s own concise lies on Twitter to the organized
prevarication of Breitbart News and NationalReport.net—ideology beat back
the truth. What Veles produced, though, was something more extreme still:
an enterprise of cool, pure amorality, free not only of ideology but of any
concern or feeling about the substance of the election. These Macedonians
on Facebook didn’t care if Trump won or lost the White House. They only
wanted pocket money to pay for things—a car, watches, better cell phones,
more drinks at the bar. This is the arrhythmic, disturbing heart of the
affair: that the internet made it so simple for these young men to finance
their material whims and that their actions helped deliver such momentous
consequences.

[snip]

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