As President Barack Obama, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, journalists and academics argue over the impact of social media-driven propaganda on the latest American election, this sleepy former manufacturing town overlooking the Vardar River in central Macedonia has found itself increasingly drawn into the debate.
BuzzFeed News identified Veles as a hub of the fake news industry seeding sensationalized or falsified information across Facebook. A reporter from Britain's Channel 4 News chased the industry's adolescent kingpins across town, cornering one 16-year-old fake news baron who said he had no plans to stop — even though he acknowledged it was wrong.
But there were no such qualms from the teenager who spoke to The Associated Press at Veles' Gemdidzii Sports Hall.
Retreating from a spirited indoor soccer game into an empty office, he walked an AP journalist through the ins-and-outs of his fake news operation on condition that neither he nor his stable of bogus news sites would be identified, because otherwise that would hurt his business.
He showed the AP how he ripped much of his material off The Political Insider, a right-wing news site that produces a steady drumbeat of pro-Donald Trump pieces. He then flipped over to Google Analytics, an audience tracking tool, to show that he'd managed to gather more than 685,000 page views a week.
No comments:
Post a Comment