So-called fake news
can have real-world consequences…
This is an arms race.
They’re going to keep getting better at this,
and we need to invest in keeping on
getting better at this, too.
How much responsibility does Facebook have
for the content on the platform?
So Facebook knew that this was happening,
and you’re saying that they were profiting?
I'm Ahmed Shihab-Eldin,
and this is a story about fake news
and the people profiting from it.
In the three months leading up to the 2016 U.S. election,
viral fake news stories generated more total
engagement on Facebook than those from the top
19 major news outlets combined.
Some of these fake stories came from an unlikely place
-- the Republic of North Macedonia,
a country of about two million people
just north of Greece.
There’s all these stories about guys over in Macedonia
who are running these fake news sites.
We found a lot of different accounts
coming from Macedonia.
Hundreds of pro-Trump websites
popped up all over the country.
And teenagers
– particularly in one poor former factory town –
purportedly made millions by duping American news consumers
on social media sites like Facebook.
I came to Macedonia to find out what the fake news
industry here is like
amid a tech industry crackdown
and reports that trolls are already preparing
to cash in on the next U.S. elections.
Saska Cvetkovska is an investigative journalist in Skopje,
Macedonia’s capital.
She says it’s not a coincidence that
Macedonia has become one of the world’s
fake news hubs.
It has a young, tech-savvy population,
an unemployment rate of over 20 percent
and the recently ousted government
regularly blasted fake news through state-run media.
She is investigating who is funding the fake news
factories in the country.
At the center of Macedonia’s fake news industry
is a man named Mirko Ceselkoski.
He calls himself an Internet marketing consultant
and Facebook strategist,
though he’s been referred to as a clickbait coach.
He says he’s taught over a thousand young people here how to make content for an American audience.
You refer to yourself as the man who accidentally
helped Donald Trump win the U.S. election.
Mirko started making money on the Internet
in the early 2000s by writing stories about yachts
and muscle cars.
He insists it was purely by accident
that his students stumbled upon the money pot
that is U.S. partisan politics.
Here’s how this works: Create a simple website
through a site like WordPress.
Choose a domain name that sounds like a mainstream
American news organization.
Copy and paste stories from alt-right sites
like Breitbart and InfoWars.
Then create or buy Facebook profiles, pages and likes.
When readers click through from Facebook to the websites,
they’re hit with dozens of ads.
With each click, the ad revenue begins pouring in
through automated advertising engines,
like Google AdSense.
The secret ingredients for a viral hit:
Did your students know much about the U.S.
or U.S. politics before they started writing these stories?
From America.
Mirko says his students often hire freelance writers
in the United States through websites like Upwork.
That’s a lot of money.
Do you feel that there’s a moral or ethical concern
to be making money off of convincing millions
of Americans that something is real,
that can then affect how they vote?
Facebook’s crackdown on fake news
has been bad for business here.
In 2020 for example,
there’s another huge election in America.
You think there will be people doing the same thing?
After meeting Mirko,
I traveled to a small town that has become the epicenter
of the fake news industry here.
I’m here in Veles, Macedonia,
a former factory town where young people,
if they’re lucky to have a job at all,
rarely earn over 300 Euros a month,
but where fake news factories
are now making some of them very rich.
I’m on my way to meet a young man named “Boris”
who has learned from Mirko's methods
and works in a content factory along with 20 others.
We weren’t invited inside.
Instead, he agreed to meet me at an Internet café.
Boris has asked that we conceal his identity
because he’s afraid of legal action from the U.S.
He didn’t want to share
just how much money he’s made,
worried it might reveal his identity.
Generally you work at night, right?
What do you think about these Americans
who were reading all this fake news,
the stuff you were publishing?
And how did you know what Americans wanted?
What Boris told me next caught me by surprise.
So Facebook knew that this was happening?
Boris is saying that in the days before the election,
the price for promoting content that was pro-Trump
on the pages he was managing
dropped significantly,
so he went all in to heavily promote Trump.
What are your plans in the next election?
My time in Macedonia left me with a lot of questions.
so I returned to the U.S. in search of answers.
We came here to Facebook’s headquarters
to find out what went wrong in the 2016 elections
and what their plans are to protect the integrity
of future elections in the U.S. and abroad.
Monika Bickert is head of content policy at Facebook.
This is definitely an area where we’ve made mistakes
and where we’re investing a lot in getting better.
If you look back to 2016,
for instance, our tools that identify fake accounts
weren’t as good then as they are now.
We’ve come across a lot of accounts
that are Macedonian and Russian accounts
that seem dubious to us
throughout the reporting process but they’re still active.
We won’t always be perfect
but I can tell you it’s absolutely a priority
to proactively find and remove those types of accounts.
In the lead-up to the French
and German elections in 2017,
Facebook removed tens of thousands of fake accounts.
But the company announced recently
that there may be as many as 87 million fake accounts
still on the platform.
Facebook is hiring thousands of people
to review content, developing artificial intelligence
to detect fake news and accounts,
and trying to contextualize articles
that have been flagged as potential fakes
so users can decide for themselves.
What would you say to American Facebook users
who are concerned about fake news
and how it might influence the midterm elections?
Facebook certainly has a role to play
in removing inauthentic actors,
fake accounts, people who are intentionally
sharing disinformation to sow discord.
At the same time,
there’s also more than we can be doing as a society
to identify when something is likely fake.
I asked her about Boris’s allegations
that Facebook was profiting off of content like his.
He claims that Facebook knew,
whether it was an algorithm’s decision or a human’s,
that the price was all of a sudden dramatically cheaper
to promote Trump content.
Well, for advertising prices,
I’d have to follow up with you on
exactly how we set those.
But we didn't receive an explanation on the record
from the company,
despite repeated attempts to obtain one.
Former Facebook employee Antonio Garcia-Martinez
has his own take on Boris’s claims.
He was a product manager who helped develop the
platform’s advertising side and left the company in 2013.
What do you make of that,
because it can be coincidence…
It may not be. It may not be.
If you employ a certain inflammatory rhetoric
that gets people engaged with your thing,
then your net media cost will be lower.
That is how Facebook is designed to work.
But it’s kind of problematic.
Right … they didn’t come up with this.
Google does the same thing.
But yeah, in this context, I think you’re right,
that maybe it is problematic, yes.
It seems like everyone benefited that was in that game.
That’s right. That’s right. As did the Trump campaign.
Antonio is critical of the company’s early attempts
to minimize the fake news problem.
Personally, I think the idea that
fake news on Facebook influenced
the election in any way I think is a pretty crazy idea.
To discard the possibility that Facebook could actually
swing the election so quickly is obviously really
disingenuous and, frankly not true.
Why?
So literally until like 72 hours before the election,
there was a huge political ads sales force, which Facebook has,
telling every politician with a marketing budget
exactly the opposite,
that Facebook could deliver them the election.
Antonio says that the reason this matters comes down to a simple but fundamental question.
How much responsibility does Facebook have
for the content on the platform?
That really is the big question.
So how does the company fix this problem?
Trillion dollar question.
I don’t know, and I don't think Facebook
knows the answer to it, either.
In his recent Senate hearing,
Mark Zuckerberg addressed the challenge of staying
ahead of fake news before it impacts future elections.
This is an arms race, right?
I mean, they’re going to keep on getting better at this,
and we need to invest in
keeping on getting better at this, too.
Hey, It's Ahmed,
so as you just saw, some fake news producers
are financially motivated,
but others have political ends in sight.
Be sure to check out this video,
we did an interview with an investigative journalist
in Russia who went under cover in a troll farm.