"}\n\u201cThis is the news of the millennium!\u201d said the story\n on WorldPoliticus.com. Citing unnamed FBI sources, it claimed Hillary \nClinton will be indicted in 2017 for crimes related to her email \nscandal.
\n\u201cYour Prayers Have Been Answered,\u201d declared the headline.
\nFor\n Trump supporters, that certainly seemed to be the case. They helped the\n baseless story generate over 140,000 shares, reactions, and comments on\n Facebook.
\nMeanwhile, roughly 6,000 miles away in a small \nMacedonian town, a young man watched as money began trickling into his \nGoogle AdSense account.
\nOver the past year, the central Macedonian\n town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush \nas locals launched at least 140 US politics websites. These sites have \nAmerican-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticUS.com, \nTrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and \nUSADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump \ncontent aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US.
\nThe\n young Macedonians who run these sites don\u2019t care about Donald Trump. \nThey are responding to straightforward economic incentives: as Facebook \nregularly reveals in earnings reports,\n a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The\n fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of U.S. display advertising \u2014 a declining\n market for American publishers \u2014 goes a long way in Veles. Several \nteens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they \nlearned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics \nstories to spread on Facebook \u2014 and the best way to generate shares on \nFacebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that \ncaters to Trump supporters.
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