Charles P. Pierce: Content Farm to Content Table

[babylonsister]

Content Farm to Content Table

Anything is true if enough people believe it.
By Charles P. Pierce
Nov 4, 2016



The single most amazing story of the election was thrown up on the Intertoobz on Thursday by Buzzfeed News. It describes how the campaign of the Republican presidential nominee has re-energized the economy of Macedonia, and it is, well, just amazing.

"Your Prayers Have Been Answered," declared the headline. For Trump supporters, that certainly seemed to be the case. They helped the baseless story generate over 140,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Meanwhile, roughly 6,000 miles away in a small Macedonian town, a young man watched as money began trickling into his Google AdSense account. Over the past year, the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites. These sites have American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US.

It is nice to know that the United States remains a target-rich environment for the world's most enterprising gifters, because this Balkan cottage industry—which may be conducted in actual cottages, for all I know—has absolutely nothing to do with politics and absolutely everything to do with separating suckers from their money. Enter the Trump campaign, which has roughly the same raison d'etre.

The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don't care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters. As a result, this strange hub of pro-Trump sites in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is now playing a significant role in propagating the kind of false and misleading content that was identified in a recent BuzzFeed News analysis of hyperpartisan Facebook pages. These sites open a window into the economic incentives behind producing misinformation specifically for the wealthiest advertising markets and specifically for Facebook, the world's largest social network, as well as within online advertising networks such as Google AdSense.

I am an old guy and, therefore, new to the ways of tout les Toobz, so I didn't know any of this. We are talking about the mass production of misinformation for profit, and it seems to be another field in which the rest of the world has caught up and passed America, which pretty much invented all the modern techniques of that craft.

snip//

It might be the height of futility to mention this now but, for those of us in this racket, there never has been a more important weekend to be good at what we do. This is the truthless, wretched election that the country has brought upon itself. You can hardly blame the starving musicians in a distant land from trying to turn a buck on it.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a50320/trump-misinformation-facebook-macedonia/

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

1. The Rs figured this out a long time ago. Sadly, many people yearn for

utter bullshit. And, like junk food, the more of it they're fed, the more they want and the more they come to hate the real thing. So-called reality tv has played a big part in priming the public for a drama queen bullshitter like Trump.