1/23/2024 0 Comments Who made bb simonOr maybe put something that I want to be there,” she says, laughing. “I would usually shorten these kinds of articles and just skip the parts I don’t want to write. Then she tells me something I don’t expect. They are long, maybe 1,000 words and the whole article maybe contains two sentences of news and after that everything is just insults. “The whole time I was typing and writing these stories, I was always thinking ‘Oh my God, who would believe this kind of garbage? How uneducated, how low intelligence do you have to be just to read them’. Marco ran two sites, which Tamara told me had more than two million Facebook followers combined.Īsked if constantly viewing such a vast amount of this content affected her, Tamara describes mixed feelings. A similar fake news site based out of Veles with around a million Facebook likes has been claimed by its owner to be able to make upwards of $2,000 per day in an interview with CNN. ![]() Tamara’s job was to rewrite the original US articles so that they couldn’t be detected as plagiarised text, as well as making them more compact and even more likely to be shared on social media, generating Google ad revenue for Marco’s site. The next step was a video call with “Marco”, a young man with an awkward manner and a job offer. “I said ‘Yeah, why not’,” Tamara recalls. “You are good in politics and you are good at your English, so would you like to work on news sites?” “I know you are doing nothing, here is a way to do something and make money and still not leave the house,” her friend had said. One day in April 2017, Tamara received a phone call from a friend. About the BBC’s Beyond Fake News season.This article also contains some strong language. Tamara wishes to remain anonymous, so to protect her identity, her name and those of the individuals she worked with have been changed. While her perspective can only ever be that of a single employee, her story reveals the reality of what it was like to work inside these sites. Over the course of three days, she told me in detail about a job she had done for nine months. I spoke with Tamara in late 2018 in a café in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia. Her job was to churn out semi-plagiarised copies of articles originally published on US extreme right-wing publications, so that her boss could serve them back to unsuspecting Americans thousands of miles away. The difference? Tamara was rewriting fabricated or misleading articles for two major copycat websites based in North Macedonia targeting US readers.
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