Many users of legitimate social-media accounts in the United States forwarded the clickbait links to friends, unwittingly spreading false or misleading information to millions of people and creating an amplifying effect that greatly enhanced revenue for the Macedonian websites. groups committed to American politics - generating advertising revenue every time somebody clicked their links. Using hundreds of fake accounts set up on Facebook and Twitter, they shared their links with conservative U.S. The Veles website operators also discovered that Trump supporters were more likely than other American voters to share "fake news" and conspiracy theories without checking the veracity of the stories. They included a fictitious story about a nonexistent criminal indictment against Trump's Democratic rival in 2016, Hillary Clinton, as well as a fabricated claim that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump's candidacy.įalse political news is again being spread in the United States by website operators in North Macedonia who disguise themselves as Americans. They began posting semi-plagiarized English-language stories filled with unsubstantiated, sensationalist claims that originally were published by right-wing-conspiracy-theory websites in the United States.Īccording to an investigation by Buzzfeed, the most shared stories from the Veles sites were "nearly all false or misleading." Veles's website operators quickly learned that stories with outrageous headlines and dubious claims were viewed and shared more often on social media than reputable journalism. "To this day, there is nothing," he said. In a recent interview with RFE/RL's Balkan Service, Arsov also denied having any links to Bogacheva or Russia. Petersburg, which has become known as a '"troll factory." (file photo)Īlthough the OCCRP investigation examined social-media posts, government records, domain-registry information, and archived versions of "fake news" sites, it did not find any evidence linking Bogacheva to the Veles websites. Special Counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. That IRA employee, Anna Bogacheva, was also among a group of Russians indicted by U.S. Petersburg, had visited North Macedonia just three months before Arsov registered the web domain in 2015 for his country's first U.S.-focused political website,. The OCCRP investigation also revealed that a least one employee of Russia's infamous "troll factory," the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. "It was launched by a well-known Macedonian media attorney, Trajche Arsov - who worked closely with two high-profile American partners for at least six months during a period that overlapped with Election Day," the OCCRP reported.
That investigative report found that the websites were "not started spontaneously by apolitical teens" with only a rudimentary grasp of English. presidential election campaign were traced to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia. Many fake news websites that sprang up during the 2016 U.S. International media organizations initially reported that the fake-news industry in Veles was run by tech-savvy teenagers.īut an investigation in 2018 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its partners revealed "secret players" behind the English-language political-news industry in Veles. The stories influenced the public discourse in the United States ahead of the election and, some argue, may have affected the outcome. Veles became the center of a global "fake news" scandal in 2016 after thousands of dubious stories were shared by more than 100 pro-Trump websites based in the town. These "content farms" in Veles still "follow the tradition of copying content" from better-known right-wing-conspiracy-theory websites in the United States, the researchers say.īut Macedonian websites have "refined their tactics since 2016 to conceal their trails and exploit right-wing social-media platforms that are less likely to take down such content," they conclude. news outlets in order to gather online advertising revenue.Īccording to a report by the Stanford Internet Observatory and their research partners at the U.S.-based social-media-analytics firm Graphika, the Macedonian website operators have altered their social-media strategies to better "target conservative Americans with partisan content copied from American outlets." Internet researchers at Stanford University say "partisan clickbait" websites in Veles, North Macedonia, are once again posing as conservative U.S. voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election is back at it in 2020.
SKOPJE - A town in North Macedonia that became famous for spreading "fake news" to U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
