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The Internet United States News Politics

The Small Macedonian Town That Runs Hundreds of Fake US Politics Websites (bbc.com) 231

dryriver writes: BBC Future has the story of "Tamara" (not her real name) who used to be paid 24 euros a day to rewrite U.S. news stories for a slew of "fake news" U.S. politics websites targeted at American news readers but run out of Velev, Macedonia. Basically, Tamara's handler "Marco" would send her eight real U.S. politics news stories via email every morning, asking Tamara to rewrite them with very extreme political views and slants injected into them. Tamara was often tasked with writing horrible things about Muslims for example, making up heinous crimes they had committed in various places, and injecting those made-up falsehoods into otherwise legit-looking news articles. The rewritten articles, which were engineered to trigger strong reactions in readers, went on Facebook -- where Marco had over 2,000,000 likes -- and on a number of "American looking" fake news websites also run by Marco out of Macedonia. On a good day, Marco would earn up to 2,000 euros a day from Google ad revenues for his fake news U.S. politics websites. Tamara, who was only paid 3 euros per article she rewrote, muses in the BBC Future article about how stupid people must be to eat up the falsehoods that she, Marco and others put online everyday. She characterizes the content of the rewritten articles as "insultingly ridiculous" and "obviously fake," but many American news readers apparently ate them up and frequently believed what they read.
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The Small Macedonian Town That Runs Hundreds of Fake US Politics Websites

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30, 2019 @09:14PM (#58683408)

    Sent from my Huawei

  • Fraud (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xylantiel ( 177496 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @09:20PM (#58683430)
    Once again we see that google and facebook are just engines for paying for fraudulent content to "increase engagement". How is this not illegal??? If a TV station started broadcasting fraudulent content made overseas paid for with advertising dollars they would be shut down in a heartbeat.
    • Yeah, but this is Web 3.0!

    • Re: Fraud (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @09:26PM (#58683466) Homepage

      But they weren't at first. It takes time for societies to impose regulation when people start abusing new mediums or technologies. Facebook and company is still relatively new with respect to the time it takes for dangers to be aknowldged, damage to be measured and observed, and new rules crafted and agreed upon. It doesn't really matter that it's obvious. Society is a large ship, it takes time to adjust course.

      • Re: Fraud (Score:4, Funny)

        by Capsaicin ( 412918 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @12:33AM (#58684004)

        But look, this will never work. When their made-up stories don't appear in the established credible media (of whatever editorial spin), people will cotton on that those stories are fabrication. Either that or they'll do their own meticulous fact checking and then call the mainstream media out for not covering some event that really should have been. People are so very careful about the information they consume. So very careful.

        It's like these Macedonians (or whoever their masters are) think that half the US population has below average intelligence or something. I mean really!

        • It's like these Macedonians (or whoever their masters are) think that half the US population has below average intelligence or something. I meanÂreally!

          It's this kind of hyperpartisan idiocy that makes the propogation of fake news so easy. A study came out in the real news recently (you probably missed it) that shows the engagement and sharing of fake news is actually an extremely tiny subset of the overall population, not "half". If you spend just a few minutes of thought you'd realize that's what you should rationally expect. There is always a small segment of people that will still be convinced by even the most ludicrous of beliefs like flat earth, bigf

          • A study came out in the real news recently (you probably missed it) that shows the engagement and sharing of fake news is actually an extremely tiny subset of the overall population, not "half".

            By "real news" I hope you mean established credible media such as the Boston Tribune or the Denver Guardian, because I would never be suckered obvious Russian troll sites like RT, NYT, Washington Post or Breaking-CNN.com. Everyone of those sites repressed the story about them taking the word 'irony' out of the dict

    • It is quite illegal. We have a problem here where the legal system is just not collectively smarter than the bad guys here, and it is under a coordinated assault. If you think Google and Facebook are equally guilty of validating illegal misinformation though, I've got some bad news for you...

    • Re:Fraud (Score:5, Interesting)

      by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @01:03AM (#58684064)

      Once again we see that google and facebook are just engines for paying for fraudulent content to "increase engagement". How is this not illegal??? If a TV station started broadcasting fraudulent content made overseas paid for with advertising dollars they would be shut down in a heartbeat.

      How is this fraud? Maybe there's an element of possible copyright violations. If simply stating untruths is illegal fraud, many people would become criminals, including the current president of the United States. Fortunately for these untruthers, the First Amendment protects their utterances. I may not like what they say, but protecting their rights to state untruths is more important than maintaining someone's purported view of universal truth.

      The real problems are (1) that social media giants like Google and Facebook allow an unprecedented ease to access thought echo chambers, (2) that there exist a significant number of people who yearn to enter these echo chambers, and (3) that these affected people are empowered as voters to transform the untruths into law. Of these problems, I consider the latter two to be the real problems.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        To be fair to Google, or more specifically YouTube, they do make an effort to burst your bubble. Because I watch some leftist channels I also get recommended a lot of far right channels that are tangentially related, as in they are reacting to the videos I watch or the subject of criticism.

        Of course the problem is that sometimes you don't want that, e.g. someone watching videos from various space agencies probably shouldn't be getting moon landing conspiracy theories, someone looking at childcare videos sho

      • I'm unclear on what parent expects Facebook to do. Read and make their own decision on the suitability of every post? I guess once robots take all our jobs we will have nothing better to do than get paid peanuts by Facebook for reading stranger's posts and flagging those we disagree with. Sort of like being a /. moderator
      • We already have lots of laws against saying false things. Slander, libel, defamation, fraud, false advertising, perjury, lying to a federal agent. All of these are examples of crimes that consist of saying something false. Free speech does not include a right to tell lies.

        We also recognize there can be gray areas, and trying to outlaw all lies would be a really bad idea. So we try to be cautious, and only make lying illegal in cases where you're clearly hurting someone by doing it. But that's a practic

    • Once again we see that google and facebook are just engines for paying for fraudulent content to "increase engagement". How is this not illegal??? If a TV station started broadcasting fraudulent content made overseas paid for with advertising dollars they would be shut down in a heartbeat.

      Because it's user content, because there are laws protecting them, because fraud slips in and isn't the primary purpose (regardless of what you may think), and because you seem to be oblivious that the same thing happens on TV and they don't get shut down either.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Wait a minute their matey, you just totally described what it is like watching USA news in Australia and they are not shutting them down nor even banning them in Australia. I mean pretty much totally sick of having to type in exclusion to US news sites when ever I do a news search in Australia, it is really annoying and it is bloody obvious Youtube loads them in first place not because those news sites are popular but because Alphabet are a pack of propagandistic cunts.

      Why do Americans believe that Macedons

    • This is a vanishingly small percentage of what goes on with these platforms. You may as well outlaw the printing press because someone used it to print ads for homepathic medicine.
    • Go to Macedonia and try to get an international execution title against ... well, whoever. And if you succeed in Macedonia, the whole shit will continue from a country where the police has their hands full with criminals that ravage their own land and who will quite literally laugh in your face when you come along with something that not only doesn't affect them at all but also puts foreign money into their country's pockets.

    • Once again we see that google and facebook are just engines for paying for fraudulent content to "increase engagement". How is this not illegal??? If a TV station started broadcasting fraudulent content made overseas paid for with advertising dollars they would be shut down in a heartbeat.

      "How is this not illegal?" Well, in the USA, we have free speech. It's in the Constitution. The classic example is that you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater to cause a panic when there is no fire, but free speech doesn't mean you can't lie. If nobody is giving money because they are lied to, this probably falls under free speech and is protected. Besides, based on what I see on Facebook (I'm American by the way) a rather large percentage of Republican Party supporters really don't care about

      • Free speech is a "contract" between government and citizens. The government can not harass citizens at will because they attack the government.

        Free speech has nothing to do with your examples, it would be easy to make anti fake news laws without any impact on free speech.

    • by thomst ( 1640045 )

      Xylantiel trumpeted:

      Once again we see that google and facebook are just engines for paying for fraudulent content to "increase engagement". How is this not illegal??? If a TV station started broadcasting fraudulent content made overseas paid for with advertising dollars they would be shut down in a heartbeat.

      Nice conflation there, buckaroo. Pity it's so obvious.

      Unlike Faceplant, Google has no desire - nor need - to "increase engagement." Since it chloroformed Google+, it has pretty much entirely exited the social media market. And for good reason.

      It doesn't need "engagement." Despite Microsoft's mightiest efforts, the use of Bing as a primary search engine is pretty much a rounding error. And, while privacy-focused users tend to avoid "googling" in favor of DuckDuckGoing, they are very much

    • I think it's simply decent money ever since Lehman's in those parts of the world - beats shooting up krokodil and sisa from mom's kitchen i bet - When it comes to fake news i doubt the americans have a headstart anymore. The Eu is making serious amends to catch up, from the little millions-of-euros-funded copyright research report over 'internet filters' which are basically government protected news with the sharp bits cut off to now a biometrics database of over 300 million people. And here i thought Trum
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30, 2019 @09:22PM (#58683448)

    An article about making up fake articles, wait a second....

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Well spotted. This site has zero credibility, this BBC thing didn't even exist 2 years ago! And I have it on good authority that this BBC thing is actually run by Trolls based in Uzbekistan.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The BBC is generally reliable and prints corrections. If the read TFA you will see that they appear to have done their homework and you can verify their claims for yourself.

      Let's not go down the post-truth road of doubting everything and simply selecting our preferred facts.

  • by oic0 ( 1864384 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @09:32PM (#58683492)
    Americans are Dumb for believing her articles... meanwhile shes earning 24 euros a day writing articles for someone earning 2000 euros a day from them...
    • Mussing about how stupid people must be to eat up the "Insultingly ridiculous" and "obviously fake" falsehoods - in Macedonia. [wikipedia.org]

      "Antiquization (Macedonian: ÐнÑÐÐÐÐÐÐÑÐÑÐ), sometimes also ancient Macedonism (Macedonian: ÐнÑÐÑÐРмÐÐÐÐонÐÐÐм), is a term used mainly to critically describe the identity policies conducted by the nationalist VMRO-DPMNE-led governments of North Macedonia in the period between 2006 and 2017.
      In the contemporary Macedonian discourse, antiquization refers to the identitarian policies based on the assumption that there is a direct link between today's ethnic Macedonians and Ancient Macedonians.[2]
      The recent politics of history therefore not only embrace the recollection of the alleged ancient heritage of the Ancient Macedonians, i.e. the heritage of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, but also seek to depict a coherent continuity of history from the ancient Kingdom of Macedon until the modern Republic of Macedonia in order to reveal the uniqueness of the modern Macedonians and their country.
      This continuous and supposedly linear historiography includes the assertion that the modern ethnic Macedonians are direct descendants of the Ancient Macedonians.
      The expression "antiquization" originates from the history of arts and describes "the Renaissance practice of giving a city the appearance of ancient Rome or Athens through the introduction of structures organized in the classical mode".[3]
      While critics use the term "antiquization" in order to reveal "a state-framed set of actions such as direct interventions in the public space and in the public sphere of society in general",[4] proponents of the government's politics regard the term "antiquization" as an invention and neologism that is used as a part of anti-Macedonian propaganda."

      Basically, their major ruling nationalist christian conservative right-wing populist neo-liberal party has been running on propaganda that Macedonians are the actual Greeks and that Greeks are actually not.
      Complete with misplaced huge statues of Alexander the Great.
      It's etymological fallacy [wikipedia.org] as policy.

    • Want to know how cleaver she is? She's hitting just shy of the average country salary for Macedonia by making minor adjustments to 8 news articles.
      Holy hell I wish I had a job like that available to me in the past (not now obviously because I earn more than average), but hell back when I was banking an average salary I worked a shitton harder than that.

    • How's that different from you making 50 bucks a day working for someone who makes 50 grand a day? Before bonuses, that is...

  • is where the majority of /. comments are written too, oddly enough
  • by Anonymous Coward

    When it is a left wing hit piece demonizing White Christians it is an informed well reasoned piece of old timey journalism.

    I don't even hate Muslims, but think the hypocrisy is amazing. How did we create this world where the left is against Russia, the right is for Russia, the left supports Muslims who want to keep women wearing burkas and the right wants to hate religious fundamentalists who like guns (aka Muslims)

    Both sides are absolutely insane. I just think that if everything she ever wrote is an out

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @11:03PM (#58683762)

    Just because you publish fake news doesn't mean someone believed it.

    Just like I wonder how many of this 2k likes were real, when obviously you would fabricate likes on a page meant to lure people into reading fake news...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Just because you publish fake news doesn't mean someone believed it.

      There's people here who seriously believed pizzagate and continually spout the most ludicrous fake facts. Now the thing is they're generally your side so you have a strong incentive to play that down as opposed to having any degree of introspection.

    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      Tamara probably thinks they believed it because they shared it, and because she reads the comments about it.

      Marco probably doesn't care, as long as it's driving traffic that generates ad revenues.

  • by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @11:17PM (#58683806)

    This has been known for many years. And the Velev fake newsers were not pushing any political barrow either. They just wanted to make money from Google Ads on their sites. Google closed that down some time ago.

    The reason that so much of their output was far right rather than far left was simply that far left garbage was harder to sell. It just petered out on social media. Whereas the Right stuff worked much better.

    I doubt if it made much difference politically. Those that read this have made up their mind how to vote long ago.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/magaz... [bbc.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    You don't have to make up horrible things Muslims do. Its all pretty well documented in the Quran.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Guys, the country's name is North Macedonia. The name dispute with Greece ended a few months back with the signing of a treaty. Please inform yourselves and respect it.

  • Missing from the report are such facts as:

    even one url of any of the fake news sites;
    a verifiable figure of the visitor numbers to the fake news sites;
    an example of an original non-fake story with its fake counterpart;
    any verifiable fact so far as I can tell.

    The "story" seems to be, in fact, that Muslims are victims and that we should not believe negative reporting about any of them.

    • Maybe someone can rewrite the story to add some facts.

    • even one url of any of the fake news sites;

      www.facebook.com

      an example of an original non-fake story with its fake counterpart;

      Holy crap you have been living under a rock the past 3 years.

      The "story" seems to be

      The story seems to be completely believable and obvious given the current world we live in and the content you can see around you online. Your rejection of it and your twisting of the "story" seems to imply you're anti-muslim, one of the people called out as stupid in TFS, and are now getting defensive.

      • by julian67 ( 1022593 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @04:34AM (#58684506)

        Thank you for your kind words and thoughtful response.

        "facebook.com" isn't the useful URL is it? The fake news stories clearly originate elsewhere and are then referenced and linked by users on FB. That seemed obvious enough not to need explicit expression, but never mind.

        I maintain that an absence of verifiable facts or sources is a major deficiency in a news article, especially one published by an organisation which is funded by public money.

        I didn't raise the issue of Islam, the author did. It seems to be central to the piece, in fact discrediting bad news about Islam seems to be one of its aims. Another is to present ordinary people who arrive at conclusions not of the orthodox liberal/left as stupid, credulous and easily manipulated.

        • I didn't raise the issue of Islam, the author did. It seems to be central to the piece, in fact discrediting bad news about Islam seems to be one of its aims.

          Actually the subject of the interview raised it. And in a several-thousand-word article it mentioned Muslims 3 times. So it came up, but doesn't seem central by a long shot.

          I maintain that an absence of verifiable facts or sources is a major deficiency in a news article, especially one published by an organisation which is funded by public money.

          It's not investigative journalism breaking a new story. It's a character profile to lend some first-hand context to a story that has been in the news for several years. We've seen plenty of examples. This is just showing where some of it is coming from.

          • It doesn't have to be investigative for a few facts to be a basic requirement.

            When MsMadeUpName talks about working for MrEvil in the town of MisSpelled and the thread running through all this is "making up nasty shit about Muslims" and the only substantiation offered is a CNN video piece on youtube....gee, I guess it must all be the Gospel Truth!

            It looks like drip feed propaganda.
            It reads like drip feed propaganda.
            It comes from sources who like to drip feed propaganda.
            I wonder what it could be?

  • Smartereveryday has several good videos on this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
  • ...rewrite them with very extreme political views and slants injected into them. Tamara was often tasked with writing horrible things about Muslims for example, making up heinous crimes they had committed in various places, and injecting those made-up falsehoods into otherwise legit-looking news articles.

    On a good day, Marco would earn up to 2,000 euros a day from Google ad revenues for his fake news U.S. politics websites.

    Hang on. Isn't this Fox News business model, i.e. getting eyeballs on advertising with sensationalist, often untrue stories? Are those wily eastern Europeans copying them and making money regardless of the longer-term political outcomes?

    Is making money from sensationalising news the reason why we're experiencing the current surge in extreme right-wing politics? Sounds more feasible and likely to me than interference from hostile state actors.

    It also says a lot about how gullible and capable of extremism th

    • Re:Fox News? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jebrick ( 164096 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @06:37AM (#58684818)

      Do not confuse opinion with news.

      Chris Wallace does news. Sean Hannity does opinion. While both Fox and MSMBC have political bends to their stories, they both strive to tell the News correctly. Both just have non-news people who will come on and tell you how to view the story.

  • meh (Score:1, Insightful)

    Tamara was often tasked with writing horrible things about Muslims for example, making up heinous crimes they had committed in various places, and injecting those made-up falsehoods into otherwise legit-looking news articles.

    Nobody needs to make up anything heinous, that's one culture/religion that is at vicious, duplicitous war with it's neighbors around the world and throughout history.

    And that goes for all of this. Nobody needed to make up anything about Hillary for her to lose; she was just an awful candidate, even for those who should have been on her side.

    Blaming Russians, Macedonians, "fake news", sunspots, and everything else just makes you people look more and more pathetic.

    You lost. You just plain lost. and the mor

    • So you're endless spasms about him are not having the effect you think they are having.

      Oops, a typo. Clearly, that invalidates anything I might say or think, lol

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AGD ( 231469 )

      Have yet to see a URL example of any of these purported fake news sites.

  • by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @07:17AM (#58684926)
    2 million likes is not very many on a platform with billions of users. How many of those are fake accounts? The summary may as well say "NOT many American news readers ... ate them up " Seriously, in any sufficiently large population you are going to find a good number of idiots, ignoramuses, careless people, teenagers who think it is funny to like crap, and so on. There is nothing particularly American or conservative about this phenomenon. Neither Facebook nor the government are going to be able to do anything about the inherent variability, for good and bad, in humankind.
  • Tamara, who was only paid 3 euros per article she rewrote, muses in the BBC Future article about how stupid people must be to eat up the falsehoods that she, Marco and others put online everyday.

    And I'm musing about how stupid you must be to waste your life writing misinformation for a pittance. Go beg in the street, probably get more $$ and a much cleaner conscience.

    Someone should prosecute Tamara, classifying her crime as use of a WMD. In The Hague. Publicly. This type of behavior needs to be VERY STRONGLY discouraged and punished. It's people like this that are literally wrecking society and the internet.

    It's people like this that make me scream 'LICENSED USERS ONLY PLEASE' on the internet.

    • Someone should prosecute Tamara, classifying her crime as use of a WMD. In The Hague. Publicly. This type of behavior needs to be VERY STRONGLY discouraged and punished. It's people like this that are literally wrecking society and the internet.

      It's people like this that make me scream 'LICENSED USERS ONLY PLEASE' on the internet. You can't do things like this. It's just so destructive and irresponsible.

      It's interesting how so many of the people who make a career out of shrieking "FASCIST!!!" at everyone to the right of AOC sound so very much like fascists themselves. A World Court Ministry of Truth, with ThoughtCrime severely punished.

      Hey, what's the worst thing that could happen?

      Here's a policy I think every decent person (every *DECENT* person) on all sides of the political spectrum should be able to get behind:

      Never give a government run by people you like powers that you would be uncomfortable seein

      • I'd like to think most people understand this, but sadly that's not the case. They're born, grow up, lack wisdom, and think they're the first to consider "doing something".

  • My momma always said stupid is as stupid does.
  • "She characterizes the content of the rewritten articles as "insultingly ridiculous" and "obviously fake," but many American news readers apparently ate them up and frequently believed what they read."

    Hey Tamara, did you know Macedonia is really just Greece, and shouldn't be separate? I heard NATO supports that...
    ( Tamara picks up gun storms out to confront NATO)

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