Thread: How Facebook powers money machines for obscure political 'news' sites

IME, just about everything on Facebook that says "share", "share this now", "what do you think yes or no?" or asks any question that requires a response, is clickbait and probably made up by one of the hundreds of foreign fake news sites (Eastern Europe, Philippines, Middle East) that are only interested in making money from Google Ads. The number of fake profiles using "American" names used to propagate this mess are legion. Just sayin.


How Facebook powers money machines for obscure political 'news' sites

From Macedonia to the San Francisco Bay, clickbait political sites are cashing in on Trumpmania – and they’re getting a big boost from Facebook
Dan Tynan in San Francisco

Wed 24 Aug 2016 18.01 EDT
Last modified on Fri 9 Feb 2018 14.08 EST
This article is 1 year old

All of the sites exist primarily for one reason – to cash in on the seemingly endless appetite for news about Donald Trump. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/APDonald Trump may be struggling to capture a majority of voters in the heartland of America, but there is one eastern European precinct he would likely carry in a landslide – if only they were allowed to vote in US elections.

The town of Veles, Macedonia (population 44,000), is the unlikely home for dozens of avowedly pro-Trump political news sites, featuring headlines like Hillary’s Illegal Email Just Killed Its First American Spy and This is How Liberals Destroyed America, This Is Why We Need Trump in the White House.

The Guardian has identified more than 150 domains registered to people claiming addresses in Veles, though not all of those are associated with active websites.
Some claim to garner millions of page views per month. Most others are relatively obscure. All of them exist primarily for one reason – to cash in on the seemingly endless appetite for news about Donald Trump. And they’re getting a big boost from Facebook.

Fake names and death threats

The creator of a popular Macedonian site, “Alex” claims that he was one of the first of his countrymen to write about US politics. (Alex is not his real name, and he spoke on condition of anonymity.) He claims his neighbors copied his idea and have capitalized on the Trump wave. According to Alex, his site gets more than 1m visits a month, roughly half of them driven by his Facebook page.

“We are an independent news magazine with [our] primary goal to influence American policy, especially politics,” says Alex, who originally favored Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries. “Then my city fellows saw what I was doing and started to copy my work. They are just looking to earn money from ad networks.”

In fact, these foreign sites probably wouldn’t exist without their domestic counterparts, from whom they crib many of their stories. (Alex admits he started out by copying and pasting stories from conservative US news sites but says he’s recently hired a half-dozen US-based writers to produce original content.)

There are hundreds of relatively obscure political sites registered on this side of the Atlantic that grab news from mainstream outlets, rewrite the headlines to be click-friendly, and blast them out to their readers using Facebook.

Many of these sites are registered privately, and the author names that appear on their pages are often fictitious or nonexistent. Using the search engines provided by Domain Tools, the Guardian was able to comb through historical domain name records and contact the owners of some of these sites.

At Bipartisan Report, a left-leaning news site, about two-thirds of the authors use pseudonyms, says publisher Justin Brotman. The reason? Personal safety.

“Most of our authors start out saying, ‘I’ll use my real name, I don’t care’,” he says. “One week in, after they start getting death threats, they change their minds.”
Brotman won’t reveal how much money his site makes, but it’s enough to pay a staff of 15 freelance writers, who get compensated based on how much traffic their stories generate. Bipartisan Report’s Facebook page, which has 825,000 likes, plays a large role in sending traffic his way.

“All social media is of utmost importance,” he says. “If your goal is straight page views then Facebook is the best investment of your time. It does drive more ‘clicks’ than posting on other platforms with an equal amount of followers. But I’d put Twitter way ahead in lending credibility and enhancing our brand.”
‘Share, share, share it all over Facebook’

Even smaller sites are making bank on the surge of interest in the Republican nominee. Liberty Writers News, a two-person site operating out of a house in the San Francisco Bay Area, generates income of between $10,000 and $40,000 a month from banks of ads that run along the side and bottom of every story.

Paris Wade and his partner Ben Goldman have mastered the art of getting traffic. The ability to write a clickbaity headline, toss in some user-generated video found on YouTube, and dash off a 400-word post in 15 to 30 minutes is a skill they don’t teach in journalism school, says Wade, who graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in advertising.

Three months after launching the site, Liberty Writers News gets up to 700,000 visitors a day, a number that has been doubling every month. Again, though, they owe nearly all of that growth to Facebook.

“About 95% of our traffic is coming from Facebook,” Wade says. The Liberty Writers News page has about 150,000 likes, but by sharing stories with other like-minded Facebook pages, they can extend their reach to as many as 7m or 8m viewers, he adds.

They spend around $3,000 a month paying Facebook to promote the page. Once they started doing that, their traffic doubled, says Wade.

They also end some stories with enthusiastic cries to “*** Share this right now! Let’s beat the liberal media to it. Share, share, share it all over Facebook.”

But what Facebook gives, it also takes away, Goldman adds. If one of their stories gets shared too quickly, Facebook assumes it is spam and throttles it for a period of time, which reduces the number of people who can see it in their news feed. That doesn’t happen to mainstream sites such as the New York Times or Washington Post, he adds.

Those sites feature a blue check mark on their Facebook pages, certifying they are authentic brands. That’s one of the reasons the pair are talking to the press – to establish their credentials as a legitimate news organization so Facebook will stop throttling them.

“We want that blue check mark,” Wade says.

The US presidential election will be over in less than three months. Regardless of the outcome, Trump fever is likely to subside, possibly leaving many of these sites without their biggest source of traffic. Goldman and Wade say they’ll just transition to covering other news about politics or celebrities. “People love stories about celebrities,” he says.
Even Alex the Macedonian publisher is not worried. “I think my traffic will be fine if Trump doesn’t win,” he says. “There are too many haters on the net, and all of my audience hates Hillary.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...election-trump

Guess they made their bucks & exited - their site Liberty Writer News doesn't exist now. But they wanted to be on par with NYT & Wash Post so they could get the blue check mark as a legitimate news service to make more money, not be slowed down by facebook.

They spend around $3,000 a month paying Facebook to promote the page. Once they started doing that, their traffic doubled, says Wade.

Have to wonder @ all the info Facebook is able to collect & what they do with it. Liberty Writers News alone claimed 700k viewers a day. And by sharing stories with other like-minded Facebook pages, they can extend their reach to as many as 7m or 8m viewers - all for a 15-30 minute writing task.

Google is being fined...Facebook was too
Belgian Court Orders Facebook: Stop Collecting User Data

Failure to comply reportedly incurs daily fine of over $300 thousand

RT - February 16, 2018 50 Comments


A Belgian court has ordered Facebook to stop collecting data about the country’s citizens, and to delete information previously gathered. It threatened to fine the social network €250,000 a day if it fails to comply.

In its ruling, the court determined that Facebook does not adequately inform users that it is collecting information. “Facebook informs us insufficiently about gathering information about us, the kind of data it collects, what it does with that data and how long it stores it,” the court said, determining the social network had broken privacy laws. “It also does not gain our consent to collect and store all this information.”

The court also noted that Facebook uses various methods to track the online behavior of people who aren’t members of the website, by placing cookies and invisible pixels on third-party sites.

If Facebook fails to comply with the court’s judgment, it will be fined €250,000 (US$311,232) per day, with a cap of €100 million.
The case came after the Privacy Commission watchdog filed a case against Facebook in June 2015. At the time, the social network said it was confident there was no merit in the case, calling the watchdog’s decision to take it to court “theatrical.”

Facebook previously said it was only subject to laws in Ireland, the site of its European headquarters. It also described cookies as being industry standard, stressing that internet users had the option to opt out.

The Friday ruling comes after Spain’s data protection watchdog fined Facebook €1.2mn in September, also saying the social network breached laws designed to protect people’s information and confidentiality. In December 2016, the European Union fined Facebook €110 million after finding it guilty of providing misleading information before winning approval to buy the messaging app WhatsApp in 2014.

https://www.infowars.com/belgian-cou...ing-user-data/