Eight years after the discovery that fake news was digitally produced in Veles in favor of the then presidential candidate Donald Trump, that "factory" for the production and sale of American patriotism is still active. Despite the fact that in previous years Facebook deleted and blocked pages that were found to be spreading fake news, Northern Macedonia it still tops the list of countries that create pages for the purpose of "pumping up" American patriotism.
The prestigious magazine "Forbes", in a survey published on August 26 of this year, indicates that 67 such pages have been discovered. They have since been defunct, and were pioneers in producing news about American culture or identity, even though they were based outside the United States of America. writes Deutsche Welle (DW).
On August 4,7th, those pages had a total of nine million followers, more than the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. At the same time, pages managed from the territory of North Macedonia are convincingly in first place with XNUMX million followers.
Macedonia is still the dominant supplier of fake news
Thirty-three sites were in North Macedonia, and others were spread across countries as diverse as Canada, France, Morocco, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Meta spokeswoman Margarita Franklin told Forbes that all of the pages violated the company's authenticity rules because they misrepresented their location and were removed.
"It's not necessarily a violation of Meta rules when a page is launched in one country for another country, but pages cross the line when they lie about where they're from," Meta said. According to that data, the pages were only active for a week before they were removed.
Business with artificial intelligence
There are indications that these sites are still active, and that they are even strengthening their activity based on artificial intelligence. Therefore, it is increasingly attractive to create "American" pages outside the United States of America that produce fake news for Facebook. Ahead of the US presidential elections, the social network hosts more than a hundred pages with the theme of American patriotism. Examples are "Proud American", "Proud to be American", "American Story" or "We are America".
Despite the names, many of these sites are not American at all. Behind them are foreign so-called "spammers", many of whom are based in North Macedonia. They use artificial intelligence to ensure a high number of clicks.
Posts containing prayers for US soldiers, rewritten tweets, mimes and pictures of old Hollywood pinup girls are linked to AI-generated messages against which spammers can sell ads. Sites that promote false American patriotism are desirable advertising platforms, because in the world of advertising, American clicks are among the most valuable.
A long history
Macedonian spammers have a long history on Facebook. During the 2016 US presidential election, the Welles teenagers spread fake news to millions of Americans on Facebook, earning tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. Now artificial intelligence has given them the ability to produce an infinite amount of low quality news or outright fake information.
"Pages are starting to use AI-generated images to appeal to US Facebook users and, at least in some cases, it's working." A post last week on the Canada-based American Patriots page featured an AI-generated photo of an American soldier and his children. That post had 100.000 clicks and 35.000 comments. "The 'American Patriot' page is directing people to click on a link to a low-quality page," the Forbes analysis said.
Ever since it was revealed in 2016 that campaigns of lies in favor of Donald Trump influenced the outcome of the US election, online fraudsters have taken up a new game. In February of this year, Radio Free Europe conducted research that revealed that they are directly profiting from the "Trump brand", selling worthless likenesses, coins, decals and stickers that supposedly bring customers a big profit when Trump becomes president. 69 pages have been identified on social networks that sell fake pictures with Trump's image. 45 of them are based in Veles. Among the people involved in this are students, butchers, and owners of children's playhouses, but no one wanted to answer questions about the fraud.
In June 2017, Facebook started a major campaign to delete the profiles and pages of spammers from Veles who spread fake news. Then hundreds of such pages were deleted, and a year later an investigation by BuzzFeed and the Macedonian Research Laboratory revealed that the "business" with fake news was started by two brothers who are hired by American conservatives as authors.
