at the start of 2016 in a small town called veles in macedonia an 18 year old high school student discovered that he could make more money than his parents by building fake news sites to protect his identity will call him Boris and here's how he did it he wrote tons of false articles about the US election most of them salacious the articles were shared on Facebook garnering tons of traffic so much so that Boris is most popular website earned him sixteen thousand dollars over the course of a few months that's way higher than the average
monthly salary in Macedonia which is three hundred and seventy one dollars so Boris dropped out of high school and he was not alone in the final weeks of the election there were more than a hundred political websites registered to Bellis the most popular stories were pro-trump but that's not because boris and his fake news publishers liked the candidate they just liked the money Trump supporters just happened to be more likely to share fake news researchers tracked 30 million shares of pro Trump stories on Facebook in the months before the election but why were companies advertising
on fake news sites they weren't directly those ads were placed by services like Google Adsense or AppNexus which act as intermediaries between advertisers and small-time publishers like Boris they negotiate how much ads cost and manage payments from advertisers to publishers those ads follow people wherever they go online remember when you recently searched for that one Z well that search was tracked and matched with advertisers selling that product so everywhere you go on the web a 1zn follows advertisers and these services create black lists of sites they won't advertise against but it's hard to keep up
so sometimes they pop up on fake news sites that haven't been discovered yet while boris and his friends were making money fake knees became one of the major scandals of the 2016 elections many wondered if sites like Boris's even helped Trump win a joint study by NYU and Stanford University found that it may not have tipped the election as much as one would think it found that one fake news story would need to be as persuasive as 30 six TV commercials to swing a voter fill the backlash force tech giants like Google and Facebook to
do something Facebook is now partnering with fact-checking organizations like Snopes and PolitiFact's to flag articles that present deliberately misleading content Google now cuts off Adsense revenue to sites with spoof domains like New York Times politics.com but that's still flagging fake news after it's been published and shared so tech companies like mote propose combining algorithms with human insight to catch fake news before it spreads [Music]
