The Macedonian Fake News Factory

Learn how teenagers and youth from a tiny town in a small country are whimsically influencing events that affect the entire world.

We all speak of Fake News as if its just something floating around, somewhere else.

Most of us don’t even know how massive this outbreak of alternative reality is, and how it’s actually being propagated.

Chip-Monks had first written about Fake News and how normal folks, including you, could be unwittingly propagating this alternative reality. Do read that article available here, it’ll help you realise how seemingly-innocuous text changed history.

The history I’m talking about is the alleged impact of Fake News in the recent Presidential elections in the United States Of America. Subsequent to the elections, a huge wave of public awareness and media push caused even Facebook to recognise this new digital warfare.

Facebook is being forced to take some pioneering steps towards combating this alternative reality to prevent a recurrence of incorrect information influencing public action. It will be interesting see how the world’s largest information exchange platform plans to address this growing epidemic.

Well, I can only help you learn a bit about how Fake News has been known have been triggered and fuelled in the last few months. Suffice to say, it’s been taking over the internet to an extent that Fake News (or even it’s rumoured presence) has been spreading panic and ambiguity around the globe — appropriating public opinion, and causing massive blunders in public policy.

Let’s start from the top.

Fake News does not just float in like clouds wafting in through your window on a rainy day. It is manufactured, with a lot of dedication, precision, for a specific purpose and with absolute blindness to the consequences (on the part of the ghost writer).

Things started to unfold, with Donald Trump’s completely unbelievable victory in the U.S. Presidential Elections of 2016.
So great was the consternation that a huge mass of people started to dig into the ‘how’. And strange were their findings!

While conspiracy theorists began talking about the hacking of electronic voting machines and other such vote-manipulation tactics, others looked elsewhere and found something even more unbelievable.

International publications such as The Guardian and Buzzfeed ran stories about how a huge amount of pro-Trump websites were surprisingly found to be registered to a small town in the Republic of Macedonia, a small country near Greece!

Most of the stories on these websites were found to be fake, including the stories about Pope’s endorsement of Trump and the popular theme of the imminent criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton.

Stories from these sites started feeding into the internet during the frenzy of the election cycle, and as they (the stories) started to get more and more clicks, they were picked up and handsomely rewarded by the largest marketing platforms in the digital world today, each of them automated, each of them massive.

Facebook and even advertising engines like Google AdSense started showing off these stories due their automated ‘trending’ engines; thereby triggering a cyclical reaction, and causing a digital gold rush. Money started flowing into this relatively poor town that had little to no resources otherwise.

The question then became, who was behind these websites?

Well, the answer can be a little shocking for most people. Most of these websites were run by teenagers, or people in their early twenties, who though quite young, possess great acumen for making money. The poverty in their city was the last needed push.

Let’s take an example of a person behind the story of Trump having slapped a supported in a rally in North Carolina.

Let’s call the person who wrote this story, Stephan. This was Stephan’s first ever story, and he basically just went around the internet looking for something that would instigate someone. Having found this quite obviously volatile story, he put it up on his website Daily Interesting Things. Next, he posted the link on Facebook, seeding it within various groups devoted to American politics, and the first day it got about 800 shares.
That was February 2016, and in that month Stephan made about USD 150 (~ INR 10,000).

As things took off, and it got closer to the election, Stephan made USD 16,000 between August and November. That is about INR 1,000,000.

Author’s Note: These figures are based on actual numbers; we’ve only altered the names related to this incident.

Just to put things into perspective, the average monthly salary in Macedonia is USD 370.

That still leaves some things that need to be answered.

For starters how did the stories come around, and how did these people know exactly where to hit?!

People like Stephan are not too good with English, definitely not good enough to have written all those stories by themselves. It is also doubtful that they would know exactly where it was that they should be hunting. What they are good at, however, is scavenging.

The elections summoned forth the energies of countless alt-right websites in the US, which manufactured white-label falsehoods disguised as news at an industrial scale.
This fed into the alt-right Trump, versus the liberal Clinton and Sanders binary.

Even then, though, these people needed to do a little experimenting, to decide what exactly was it that they had to hit. For a bit, Stephan tried to work with anti-Sanders articles, and that did not go as well for him, apparently because supporters of Sanders do not tend to give in to information on the internet too easily.

So Stefan kept feeding into the Clinton and Trump binary.

He fell into a routine — he would scavenge the internet for stories a few times a day, do a simple copy-paste, and then put the stories on his website. He would then use the 200 or so fake Facebook profiles he had acquired to post the stories in groups and other channels, which would help bring the traffic over. He learned better ways to trick his visitors; big ads breaking the text up, for instance, so that one in five visitors to a page would end up clicking on an ad. And so on.

What’s noteworthy however, is that this is but one real life example. Making money off of the internet in Macedonia, and places of the kind, long predates Trump’s election campaign. What’s even more scary is that despite public outcry, this Fake News machinery has outlasted the campaign.

Despite Google’s and Facebook’s post-election attempts to crack down, there’s not been too much of a change in the tide of such alternate realities. Perpetrators have leveraging many routes to peddle their wares. They go anywhere the money is.

The flow of money itself varies like the flow of the wind, politics one day and social scenarios the next.
Be it fictional stuff to affect elections, or about a bomber landing bombs in Germany (a couple months ago), or about supposed attacks in Sweden, or even flooding the world’s internet conscience with lots of news about the demonetization in India.

The most disturbing part of the entire affair is that the people running these Macedonian fake news factories are skimpy teens who do not care if a situation becomes more volatile because of the fake news they put out, or if they enable hurtful social policies. For them, it is just more money — more money than they would get otherwise… more money for a car, for a watch, even for smaller things like extra drinks at the bar, or just the status quo of more money.

They simply do not care about the consequences. At the end of the day, the internet has made it so simple for them to finance their material whims and they’re busy enjoying the spoils of News, to worry about pithy things like consequences.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.