Boris (18) made a lot of money on Trump and he left school: He made "the most unrecognizable city on Balkans" into a factory of lies!
All written articles were deprived of any ideology. Macedonians didn't care if the Trump will be the next American president, or who will win at all
The euphoria about the fake news caught the world after the presidential elections in the USA, which took place precisely one year ago, on November 8th, 2016. The media started researching who and where is writing the fake news, and the investigation was launched, which lead to the hearing in Congress. The journalists of Wired decided to discover the source of those, fake news and they ended up in a small place in Macedonia, where a young man was developing a business of writing the fake news.
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The first article which was published by Macedonian Boris about the president Donald Trump was about the incident at the election gathering in North Carolina. He wrote a news where Trump slapped a man in the crowd for disagreeing with him. Boris even found that article on the internet, he slightly adjusted it on his page Daily Interesting Things in February 2016. It was a fake news.
He shared the article on Facebook page, after which it was shared by 800 more people. Boris made his first 130 euros of Google ads. Seeing that the money literally fell from the sky, he decided to leave high school and to do fake news where he saw a decent amount of profit.
Boris loves anonymity and his real name is unknown. He lives in Veles, a city in Central Macedonia, and he does not want anyone to find out who he is in fact, writes Wired.com.
In the last weeks of the US election campaign, from "the most unrecognizable city in the world" Veles became the center of media headlines. The press like The Guardian and BuzzFeed wrote about it, just because it became a place with 100 registered pages that wrote "YES" for Donald Trump, and the thing that they had in common is that they were overcrowded with fake news.
The creator of those pages, the "anonymous Boris", made 13.780 euros on these pages from August to November 2016. If we compare that amount to the average wage in Macedonia, which is 320 euros, it is clear why Boris didn't want to come back to school.
Boris is just 18 years old, he likes Gangha rap, Wu-Tang Clan, Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, he dreams about Brooklyn and New York and he wants to leave his birthplace one day.
- You can work as a waiter here, live with your parents that give you pocket money to go out, and if you like the gym and practicing, you can perhaps get a job as a security. Few factories are offering jobs, but that is all desperate. You can't live here from a "normal job". And this with Google ads is not a real job - said Boris.
Money as an initiator
All written articles were deprived of any ideology. Macedonians didn't care if the Trump will be the next American president, or who will win at all. Their goal was to make money so they could buy a car, a watch, a better phone, alcohol. There is a terrible truth behind all of this: by wanting to make some money, the internet has provided them with the possibility to launch some fake news which was shared even by some serious media people trust.
Boris grew up in a pretty poor place, in a working-class family, eager for money and easy profit. After meeting Aleksandar Velkovski, who was working on a web page about healthy food (HealthyFoodHouse.com) and which reached 2 million followers on Facebook with over 10 million visitors in a month, Boris started opening his own web pages and to make money in that way. He worked in "regular" WordPress, he bought DailyInterestingThings.com and he filled it with various news from the sport, health, world of celebrities and politics.
After realizing that the readers are interested in news like the fake ones where Trump slapped someone, he saw a virtual potential of those things and he opened a copy-paste page of NewsYorkTimesPolitics.com where he published the news of various famous world portals like New York Times, and they even threatened him with a lawsuit. However, he didn't back down after that, but he continued to open even more pages (PoliticsHall.com and USAPolitics.co). All because of the money that was coming to his account.
The production of fake news
Boris would search for news several times a day and he copied the articles about Trump on his pages. Besides the publishing on Facebook pages of his "portals", he shared them on Facebook the groups where Americans furiously discussed the political happenings where they glorified Trump. He opened dozens of fake Facebook profiles so he can post news in groups from various profiles.
He would write few articles over the night, and he would share them on the Facebook page and in groups. he would then go to the coffee, return, publish a few more articles and then he would go out with his friends, and then he would return again to write a few more, Boris described his daily "work" pace.
When the efforts started paying off, Boris started buying things, but the euphoria didn't last, writes Wired.com.
When the world was hit by a scandal of fake news, Google blocked ads on all of his pages on 24th November.
Of course, the fake news didn't only affect the Macedonian Veles, but the entire world, and it is still dealing with them.
Boris is not working at the moment. He is hanging out with his friends, he is going around the coffee shops, he is not returning to school, he wants to learn to code and he dreams about working in Apple or Microsoft one day. At the end, he still wants to make a few pages, but he won't write about politics this time because he is disappointed in it and he thinks it brings no good.
- People are fighting each other. If a brother in a family is for one party, and the other one is for a different party, they are arguing. The media is washing our brains, and we follow them like sheep - concluded Boris his short but turbulent experience.