Interviewing a fake news writer

Sometimes you hear rumours that fake news writers earn a more than decent wage. There was at least one case where the author wrote fake content under the highly dubious assumption that it was a good way to root out the crazy people who actually believe it. And then there's the case of this lady,who writes things she fundamentally disagrees with just to earn enough to scrape by. For a whole bunch of reasons, I still favour a regulation-based approach to tackling the problem, but this suggests that economic methods could be important too.

Tamara, who describes herself as a liberal, was horrified by the content of the articles she had to rewrite. “I believe they still have the worst articles,” she says, opening a new tab on her laptop, and navigating to a website from which she would regularly copy content.  

Much of what she produced was misinformation based on real events, written in a way to provoke fear and anger among its readers. In the aggregate, the stories gave a false, skewed view of the world, playing to people’s prejudices. “That thing happened, the people were there, the place was there. So it was never fake stories” in the sense of fabricating every detail. “It was propaganda and brainwashing in the way of telling the story,” says Tamara. 

“The whole time I was typing and writing these stories, I was always thinking ‘Oh my God, who would believe this kind of garbage? How uneducated, how low intelligence do you have to be just to read them’. It’s hard to read these articles. They are long, maybe 1,000 words and the whole article maybe contains two sentences of news and after that everything is just insults. It’s hard to read. It’s not pleasant,” Tamara says. 

Was she influenced by the content? After all, some studies have suggested that simply repeating false statements leads people to believe in them. “I was aware that I was writing a lot of stories about Muslims, and how they want to spread their own propaganda and want everyone to live by their rules and things like this, and one time I found myself when I was out thinking something of this kind of nature. So I was like, ‘Wow’. Subconsciously it influenced me somehow, this propaganda, because no one is immune to this stuff if you are constantly exposed to it. It was a good thing that I caught it because it’s not my opinion.” 

She was paid 3 euros per post, amounting to a mere 24 euros per day. That’s not much to some, but triple what she might have earned doing a job locally.

'I was a Macedonian fake news writer'

If you ignored the content, the typical day of a "fake news" writer would seem like any office job. Every morning, Tamara would open her laptop to a fresh email with a link to a spreadsheet. This document contained eight stories based on the other side of the world from her, in the US.