Link.
The thing is, how do I know The Independent isn’t fake news? I know some pretty rabid Trump supporters, and they at least, will believe anything damaging to the other side. So the story seems plausible. Certainly The Independent leans Left. But are its leanings enough to make it unreliable?
I believe the article was in the NY Times, I read an article where the reporter traveled to Macedonia to interview people who build fake news sites for a living. They do very well with the sites. It doesn’t take much effort, scan the evening news, make up some plausible sounding but very biased articles based on whatever is popular that day, use wordpress, make the page manually scrolling and put the ads near the scrollbar, profit.
During the last election the webmasters, a couple of them were interviewed-it is quite a cottage industry in that city in Macedonia, were raking it in. They would have one site for Trump supporters and one for Clinton supporters. Both made money and I don’t remember if there was any profit difference between the sites. One comment I do remember, the webmaster tried to build a site for Bernie Sanders supporters but gave up after a week-those people would not believe ANYTHING without backup. It wasn’t worth building a fake news site for them. The rest of America-the cash just rolled in.
According to the article:
Mr. McDaniel wasn’t in it for the money. According to the article the folks in Macedonia are. One guy found out about the business because one of his unemployed friends started driving a BMW around town. And this was during the election when apparently everyone was clicking on links.
turns out it is well covered in the news.
Here is an article in the BBC:
There are others in NBC, CBS, etc.
Those gangs are just jealous of competitors moving in on their turf.