One group of disinformation producers that has received attention in recent
years was based in Macedonia. In the town of Veles, roughly 100 pro-Trump fake
news sites were registered and operated in the run-up to the 2016 election. These
publications used American-sounding domains such as USADailyPolitics.com,
WorldPoliticus.com, and DonaldTrumpNews.com. Our knowledge about the
Macedonian case is largely drawn from journalistic accounts, such as those
published in Wired (Subramanian 2017), BBC News (Kirby 2016), and
BuzzFeed News (Silverman and Alexander 2016). Notably, these reports suggest
that the motive behind most of the pro-Trump fake news publication in 2016 was
proﬁt (Tynan 2016): teenagers producing these stories earned up to $8,000 per
month (twenty times the typical wage in Veles during this time period).2 Because
these producers were driven by proﬁt rather than ideology, the preponderance of
pro-Trump content in 2016 was apparently driven by superior engagement
Social_Media_and_Democracy