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>The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were
by goatsi 5y ago
>The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead.
The pages weren't even being run for a political purpose, it was all about the adsense dollars. Pro Trump stories just pulled the maximum amount of traffic from Facebook.
>Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”)
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/
- RNCTX 5y agoRight above in the same paragraph in that article: > After seeing the BMW, Boris decided to start some websites of his own. He already knew there was money to be made off the internet; for a while, when he was 17, he’d been one of the many peons around the world laboring online for MicroWorkers.com, earning something like a tenth of a cent for liking a YouTube video or leaving a comment. I mean, this is the whole explanation for youtube as a platform, isn't it? You can't see who upvotes, so everyone can simply buy said upvotes. It also explains why google will play an endless string of youtube videos on my sleeping laptop despite me being asleep as well, and why Netflix auto-plays movies you scroll past. The whole of the major internet sites (except Amazon, simply because it's a store) seems to be mainly concerned with rigging menial stats.