Teenagers In Macedonia Launch Fake Pro-Trump Sites To Earn Money (buzzfeed.com)

"In Macedonia the economy is very weak and teenagers are not allowed to work, so we need to find creative ways to make some money," one 17-year-old told BuzzFeed News, which reports on a "strange hub" of over 140 political sites, all being run in the same small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. These sites have American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the U.S... The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don't care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives... The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of U.S. display advertising -- a declining market for American publishers -- goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook -- and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters... Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the U.S...
Earlier this year they experimented with fake sites supporting Bernie Sanders, "but nothing performed as well on Facebook as Trump content," according to the 16-year-old who operates BVANews.com. The largest Macedonian sites now have hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook, and sources close to one site say it earns $5,000 per month, and has even earned $3,000 in a single day.

Comments

Nothing spreads as well as anger

[guises]

There's a rule that anger is the most effective way to spread a meme - people are more likely to talk about something which makes them mad than something which makes them happy.

Re:Nothing spreads as well as anger

[0100010001010011]

This Video Will Make You Angry - CGP Grey

Re:It's FYROM

[MightyMartian]

I would imagine that they are as genetically "Macedonian" as ancient Macedonians (who were viewed as a sort non-Greek fringe Hellenic group before they began gaining significant power under Alexander's ancestors). Language isn't bound by genetic barriers, as is evidenced by the fact that most of the English are still essentially "Celtic" in molecular terms, despite speaking a West Germanic language with heavy admixtures of Norman French.

Nah, #spiritcooking started with /r/The_Donald

[Xenographic]

Has anyone ever heard of these sites before? The real news is all on /r/wikileaks.

Sounds like they make clickbait sites they want people to share and make money off the ad revenue. There's no actual indication that people take these any more seriously than the other clickbait, so it doesn't surprise me that Buzzfeed doesn't like competition.

People used to be able to go to Reddit, but /r/politics now bans anyone who mentions their paid "Correct The Record" campaigns, so .... yeah.

Re:Hardly surprising

[penguinoid]

Your statement was probably modded down for being misleading. I too can show where Trump's support comes from:

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

voters who agreed with the statement “people like me don't have any say about what the government does” were 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Trump. This feeling of powerlessness and voicelessness was a much better predictor of Trump support than age, race, college attainment, income, attitudes towards Muslims, illegal immigrants, or Hispanic identity.

Trump's support comes from people who feel they are disenfranchised. It should be no surprise that poorly educated white men feel disenfranchised; poor education has always reduced one's influence, and currently being white and male each mean you are openly discriminated against.