The city getting rich from fake news

The city getting rich from fake news

Many of the fake news websites that sprang up during the US election campaign have been traced to a small city in Macedonia, where teenagers are pumping out sensationalist stories to earn cash from advertising.

"The Americans loved our stories and we make money from them," he boasts, making sure I see the designer watch he's fiddling with. "Who cares if they are true or false?"

Goran - not his real name by the way, he's not confident enough to reveal that - is one of scores, or probably hundreds of Macedonian teenagers who are behind a cottage industry in the small city of Veles which churned out fake pro-Trump news during the US election campaign.

After copying and pasting various articles, he packaged them under a catchy new headline, paid Facebook to share it with a target US audience hungry for Trump news and then when those Americans clicked on his stories and began to like and share them, he began earning revenue from advertising on the site.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38168281

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2 replies	Author	Time	Post
The city getting rich from fake news (Original post)	TubbersUK	Dec 2016	OP
Macedonia	underpants	Dec 2016	#1
Amazing doesn't even begin to cover it...	Raster	Dec 2016	#2

Response to TubbersUK (Original post)

Tue Dec 6, 2016, 08:05 AM

underpants (176,793 posts)

1. Macedonia

This is amazing.

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Response to underpants (Reply #1)

Tue Dec 6, 2016, 08:29 AM

Raster (20,989 posts)

2. Amazing doesn't even begin to cover it...

"We are a tech company, not a media company," Zuckerberg said Monday. "We build the tools, we do not produce any content."

"The Americans loved our stories and we make money from them," he boasts, making sure I see the designer watch he's fiddling with. "Who cares if they are true or false?"

Sixty-seven percent of all U.S. adults use Facebook, and 44 percent of them get news there according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center. One imagines that many of Facebook's 1.13 billion daily users worldwide also get updates on the social network.

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The CEO's statement is a bit disingenuous. Facebook may not write the articles that appear in the Trending module or your News Feed, but it is responsible for the algorithms that repurpose them and deliver the content. Picture a newspaper: Facebook is the front page team, printing press and delivery boy rolled into one.

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