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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.
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.
The fastest way to make a buck if you don't care about anything in the way of integrity, is to tell people what they want to hear.
It's an almost guaranteed way to enrich yourself, and if there are no consequences, some people will do it.
And let's face it, the Pro-Trump crowd wants to hear what they've been told, and hear it more, and more, and nothing else.
That is how he got their votes. No surprise somebody else is skimming off the chum.
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.
This is news that we could have used A YEAR AGO! What's the point in revealing it just days before the election?
Well, and The Guardian, which broke the Snowden leak story.
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The base of Trump support is poorly educated white men.
They believe lots of easily disproven lies.
It's hardly surprising that they would click on more false clickbait.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So an AC posted above 36 Domains: https://politics.slashdot.org/...
365lifetimenews.co.uk, allforusa.com, americafans.com, angryamericanpatriots.com, berniemyhero.com, bigbluedimension.com, bigbluevision.com, bigbluevision.org, bluevisionnews.com, bvanews.com, christiantimesnewspaper.com, conservativestate.com, daily-politics.com, hardnfasttruth.com, globalnews4u.com, helping-mothers.com, magseriesusa.com, newscenterusa.com, openmedianews.com, press24.us, politicsbreaking.com, politicsintheusa.com, politicsinusa.com, spinzon.com, theamericanrevenant.com, usconservativetoday.com, usadailyinfo.com, usafreshnews.us, usalibertynews.com, usanewsflash.com, usanewslive365.com, usapoliticsnow.com, usapoliticstoday.com, usapowernews.com, usatodaypolitics.com, worldpoliticus.com
Google searching for at least these domains only brings up this post and a reddit post with the same 36 domains: https://www.reddit.com/r/polit...
Buzzfeed said "Over the past year, the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites" and "BuzzFeed News also identified another 40 US politics domains registered by people in Veles that are no longer active"
But the list seems nowhere to be found.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
They probably are descended in part from the ancient Macedonians. As is practically everyone else in Europe.
It's silly to stake a genetic claim to the heritage of a people from 2300 years ago -- if you are European. Europe had a little thing called the Migration Age which shuffled the entire continent's genetic deck. That's why you see a haplotype that's believed to have originated around the Volga River in a broad swath from the Caucuses through Greece, Southern Italy and Spain, with pockets in all kinds of odd places like Lapland. You find "Norse" DNA in the Near East too -- thanks to the crusades.
All those 19th Century eugenic theories were based on philological reconstructions; they assumed that common language and stories meant common ancestry; ethnicity turns out to have very little to do with genetics. It's a stupid argument anyway; by that standard I'm English, even though my ancestors were from China. Or contrariwise, because my ancestors were Chinese I somehow "own" Shakespeare less than some British soccer hooligan who flunked his O levels.
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Do they have a department of redundancy department like the United Kingdom of the UK does?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most of the web works this way nowadays. Just have a look at sites like buzzfeed. 20 Facts about fake sites you didn't know, no. 13 is a fake itself!
There is no interest in the content, there is interest in users clicking ads. That's why the basically fuck with users, deploy malw^W anti-adblock scripts, spy on the user and so on instead of just providing good content.
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.