The Fake News Machine

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

Veles used to make porcelain for the whole of Yugoslavia. Now it makes fake news.

This sleepy riverside town in Macedonia is home to dozens of website operators who churn out bogus stories designed to attract the attention of Americans. Each click adds cash to their bank accounts.

The scale is industrial: Over 100 websites were tracked here during the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, producing fake news that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump.


One of the shadowy industry's pioneers is a soft-spoken law school dropout. Worried that his online accounts could be shut down, the 24-year-old asked to be known only as Mikhail.

He takes on a different persona at night, prowling the internet as "Jesica," an American who frequently posts pro-Trump memes on Facebook.

The website and Facebook page that "Jesica" runs caters to conservative readers in the U.S.

The stories are political — and often wrong on the facts. But that doesn't concern Mikhail.

"I don't care, because the people are reading," he said. "At 22, I was earning more than someone [in Macedonia] will ever learn in his entire life."

He claims to have earned up to $2,500 a day from advertising on his website, while the average monthly income in Macedonia is just $426.

The profits come primarily from ad services such as Google’s AdSense, which place targeted advertisements around the web. Each click sends a little bit of cash back to the content creator.

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Mirko Ceselkoski has more than a decade of experience running websites that target American readers.

He started with sites that specialize in dubious health tips, muscle cars and celebrity gossip. But then he discovered fake news.

Ceselkoski now spends his days schooling Macedonians, including many young people in Veles, on the finer points of the fake news industry. He tells his students they'll earn at least €1,000 ($1,200) a month from their websites.

"There is a large community of young people there ... and there is nothing else to do," he said. "It spread like fire."

Ceselkoski estimates that around 100 of his pupils are now operating U.S. political news sites.

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