The Veles Trump Industry

2016

Date: Summer-November 2016 · Place: Veles, North Macedonia · Figures: Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed media editor · Lawrence Alexander, open-source analyst · approximately one hundred Macedonian teenagers, site operators · Tags: FakeNews, Adsense, ForeignFarms 01. Population 55,000 In November 2016 BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman and analyst Lawrence Alexander publish a piece identifying at least 140 pro-Trump websites traced to Veles, a small city in central Macedonia. The operators are teenagers and twenty-somethings, mostly between sixteen and twenty-five. The motive is not political. They have learned that copy-pasting sensational pro-Trump articles from American hyper-partisan sites and reposting them under domains like WorldPoliticus.com generates Facebook shares, which generate AdSense impressions, which generate dollars at Macedonian purchasing power. 02. Discovery of the Funnel One Veles operator interviewed by BuzzFeed makes sixteen thousand dollars in two months. The town's nickname becomes 'Fake News Town.' Operators report having previously tried pro-Bernie content, which did not perform; pro-Trump content does. Veles is not a Russian operation. It is a discovery, by teenagers in a post-industrial Balkan town, that the 2016 American electorate has a near-infinite appetite for one specific genre of content, and that Facebook will pay them in adjacent ad revenue to feed it. The exposé becomes the foundational case study in algorithmic-platform incentives for the next half-decade of media criticism. Sources • Craig Silverman, Lawrence Alexander, 'How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,' BuzzFeed News, 3 November 2016 • Samanth Subramanian, 'Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,' Wired, 15 February 2017 • Emma Jane Kirby, 'The city getting rich from fake news,' BBC News, 5 December 2016