“If people are stupid enough to believe these stories…” says fake news writer
If people are stupid enough to believe these stories, maybe they deserve this. That was one of the stand out moments during an interview last week between a BBC journalist and a former “fake news” writer from Macedonia.
After the 2016 presidential election in November of that year, an election that many claim was substantially influenced by deliberately fabricated online stories, the fake news industry blossomed. Hundreds of websites popped up, each writing completely invented or hyper-partisan stories mostly centered around the contentious and highly polarised subject of US politics.
In December of the following year, Facebook blocked many of those websites and have been blocking them ever since. One of those sites was the one that Tamara wrote for.
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Tamara (not her real name, rather one given to her by the BBC) was working in north Macedonia for a young man and fellow Macedonian that the BBC identified as Marco. Every morning Marco would send Tamara a spreadsheet with eight links to eight different stories. Those stories would be fake, or hyper-partisan (clearly leaning to one extreme end of the political spectrum) and Tamara’s job would be to rewrite them so Marco’s “business” wouldn’t be punished for plagiarising. It’s a method known as “article spinning”. Tamara would also make the stories more “click-worthy”, increasing their viral success across social media, and consequently increasing the ad revenue for those that operated the websites.
Tamara’s articles would typically be targeting those on the political right, conservatives. More often than not, she would find herself writing stories aimed at sowing anger towards Muslims and immigrants, and Tamara – who describes herself as a liberal – would often be horrified by the stories she would have to rehash.
I believe they still have the worst articles… As you can see I just typed ‘Muslim attacks’ and there are so many articles about Muslims attacking people. Many of these I believe are not even true, they are just making it up.
Many of the stories Tamara wrote were based on news stories from hyper-partisan websites, and referred to incidents and events that really did occur, but written in a way that is clearly slanted to the extreme of one political ideology, further muddying the waters of the term “fake news”.
That thing happened, the people were there, the place was there. So it was never [100% fabricated] fake stories. It was propaganda and brainwashing in the way of telling the story.
In fact Tamara’s story is another reason why the broad and prolific term “fake news” is being increasingly spurned by those wishing to fight misinformation on the Internet. Not only is the term frequently capitalised by politicians to describe any story or medium they don’t like, but the term paints a very simplistic black and white problem when the problem of online misinformation is actually very complex.
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According to the BBC interview, Tamara never went back to writing fabricated news stories after the site she originally worked for got blocked by Facebook in 2017, removing all of their 2 million followers. Tamara says she was asked to work for another site by the original owner, Marco, but she declined.
But it doesn’t look like she had much sympathy for those that fell for the stories she wrote.
My take was that if people are stupid enough to believe these stories, maybe they deserve this. If they think this is the truth, then maybe they deserve this as a way of punishment.
Tamara’s take on her previous role may be a controversial and divisive one, but what is apparent is that misinformation, fake news, spoof news, fauxtire – whatever you want to call it – isn’t going anywhere quick, despite efforts by the Internet’s largest companies to remove it. So it’s true that we all indeed need to start taking responsibility for what we choose to believe and share on the Internet.
You can read the full article with “Tamara” on the BBC website here.
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