Slashdot Mirror
The Fake News Machine: Inside a Town Gearing Up for 2020 (cnn.com)
CNN has a story on Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, which back in the day was known to make porcelain for the whole of Yugoslavia. But now, as an investigation by the news outlet has found, it makes fake news. Veles has become home to dozens of website operators who churn out bogus stories designed to attract the attention of Americans. Each click adds cash to their bank accounts. From the report: The scale is industrial: Over 100 websites were tracked here during the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, producing fake news that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump. One of the shadowy industry's pioneers is a soft-spoken law school dropout. Worried that his online accounts could be shut down, the 24-year-old asked to be known only as Mikhail. He takes on a different persona at night, prowling the internet as "Jesica," an American who frequently posts pro-Trump memes on Facebook. The website and Facebook page that "Jesica" runs caters to conservative readers in the U.S. The stories are political -- and often wrong on the facts. But that doesn't concern Mikhail. "I don't care, because the people are reading," he said. "At 22, I was earning more than someone [in Macedonia] will ever learn in his entire life." He claims to have earned up to $2,500 a day from advertising on his website, while the average monthly income in Macedonia is just $426. The profits come primarily from ad services such as Google's AdSense, which place targeted advertisements around the web. Each click sends a little bit of cash back to the content creator. Mikhail says he has used his profits to buy a house and put his younger sister through school. [...] That site was blocked a few months ago after Facebook and Google started cracking down on fake news sites. Mikhail is now retooling his operation, with his sights set firmly on the 2020 presidential election.
CNN started the term "fake news". Unfortunately for them, they started lying on their news stories and getting caught frequently lying. Trump then used their term "fake news" to describe CNN. It stuck to CNN because they were literally making up stories they hoped was true.
So that's why people are using the term. Its a form of irony and being mean towards CNN for telling people not to read WikiLeaks (what they were calling fake news) because it was illegal for US citizens to read WikiLeaks according to them.
Just in case somebody is thinking of taking this seriously. Macedonia has an average internet speed between 4 and 10 Mbps.
The idea that Macedonians don't have the ability to make websites is quite frankly insulting. Whether on not they can swing elections is of course debatable. However that wasn't the aim of the sites, the aim was to generate content that people wanted to read (or believe), and they appear to have succeeded.
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/...
http://www.dospeedtest.com/spe...
> this entire russia thing is the epitome of fake news
No it isn't. But the Russians have their own sophisticated troll and fake news factories. They probably don't need to rely on some freelancers in Macedonia.
The "entire Russia thing" is the epitome of fake news? Well, you're not necessarily wrong. Here's some research which shows that some of these bots, identifying themselves as British people or whatever, post exclusively between 8am and 8pm Moscow time. People pushing out propaganda which favors Russia and their goal of destabilizing the Western governments set up after the fall of the Soviet Union, doing their work during 12-hour days in Moscow time.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black