When I received an invitation last month to come to Macedonia to talk with the fact checkers and journalists at the Metamorphosis Foundation about Lead Stories' experience with our automatically generated short-form fact checking videos, I didn't hesitate for a moment. Ever since 2019 when I wrote about a network of Macedonian fake news websites operating out of the town of Kumanovo I knew I wanted to see the place for myself one day, and this was a perfect opportunity. It was also a unique chance to see Veles, another Macedonian town with a reputation when it comes to fake news.
The Kumanovo Connection & The Veles Teenagers
In 2019 Lead Stories, in collaboration with Peter Burger at the Dutch fact checking website Nieuwscheckers.nl, published a series of articles about a network of Macedonian fake news websites. One of those stories was titled "The Kumanovo-connection: Macedonian Spam Clans Still Make Money With Fake News About Muslims and Migrants", which you can still read here. It outlined how a group of people from Kumanovo ran dozens of websites copy-pasting and promoting inflammatory and often fake stories which they promoted via social media in order to earn money through advertising. As far as we could determine back then, the sites were operated by ordinary people, often with other jobs: a trucker, a policeman, even a military officer.
The result of the investigation was that the network spontaneously ceased existing right after we exposed it, or as we put it at the time "Macedonian Fake News Network Shuts Down Dozens Of Websites After Joint Investigation By Lead Stories & Nieuwscheckers", accompanied by this graphic:
(Image source: Lead Stories)
The network in Kumanovo was part of a much larger trend in Macedonia at the time, where many people would run these "fake news" websites as a side hustle to make money. The town of Veles in particular became famous for it, with many international reporters visiting it and writing about the phenomenon. The "History" section of the town's Wikipedia page (archived here) currently even boasts an entire paragraph about it, after the information about antiquity, empires and other historical events you typically find in such a section:
Veles made international news in 2016 when it was revealed that a group of teenagers in the city were controlling over 100 websites producing fake news articles in support of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, which were heavily publicized on the social media site Facebook.[1][10][11][12] Although the websites were politically charged, the motive of these websites is thought to be to generate massive amounts of ad revenue, bringing into question problems with Facebook's newsfeed algorithm.[13]
Since that time a lot has happened: when it comes to academic discussions, the term "fake news" has been largely replaced by terms like "misinformation"and "disinformation", and it now covers things like Foreign Influence and Information Manipulation ("FIMI"), scams, AI slop, conspiracy theories and good, old-fashioned false rumors.
My trip
The journey started inauspiciously: the plan was to fly in from my home in Belgium on Wednesday and to return on an afternoon flight on Friday. Unfortunately a ground crew strike in Brussels forced a rebooking to a flight on Tuesday evening, with a stopover in Vienna to change planes. We were halfway to Skopje on that second flight when the pilot announced the airport was closed due to windy conditions so I ended up back in Vienna on an airport terminal bench in the middle of the night, with a blanket from the airline and the promise of a new flight in the morning.
Fortunately the warm reception by my Macedonian hosts more than made up for the discomfort. They showed me around their offices where they publish their websites (including meta.mk, vistinomer.mk and portalb.mk), and I presented Lead Stories' work in automated fact check video generation (which you can see examples of on our TikTok account). We also discussed our experiences with Community Notes on X: because Macedonian is a language with relatively few speakers it is quite hard for notes to gain enough votes to become visible. And because there aren't many Macedonians on Bluesky (yet?), Unclouder, the Bluesky labeler with fact checks that I'm working on, might be of limited use to Macedonian audiences too, but we'll see.
I also had a nice walk around downtown Skopje to have a look at all the new statues it is famous for, including the one my host assured me was definitely NOT Alexander the Great (but that's a whole other story). I was told the entire downtown area had undergone a makeover in recent years and it definitely showed: brightly lit buildings, large squares, lots of open space and statues everywhere.
One of the personal highlights of the trip for me was getting to actually visit the towns of Veles and Kumanovo. They are both just a short car drive away from Skopje so on two evenings we went there to have dinner and take pictures. When I sent some of the images back to fellow fact checkers in Belgium it caused hilarity and calls to "Go get them, Maarten!" in the group chat. The closest we got to seeing any of the fabled "fake news factories" was when my hosts pointed out an apartment building they were supposedly operating from. But it was nice to finally see the place for myself.
There was an unexpected bonus at the end of the trip: it so happened that the local Institute of Communication Studies was having a conference in Skopje where they were presenting a report with recommendations on how to respond to foreign information manipulation. And that is how I suddenly found myself in a conference room listening to a speech by Hristijan Mickoski, the Prime Minister of Macedonia, sharing the stage with several academics and the British ambassador. I didn't learn any Earth-shattering new insights but that may have been the fault of the real-time translation and the fact that I had a plane to catch...
Takeaways
In talking to my Macedonian colleagues I was reminded of one thing: even though many people (including myself) have been referring to the Veles and Kumanovo operations as the proverbial "Macedonian teenagers" for years, in reality most of them weren't that young and some of them were (and still are) highly professional and organized, with most people having a clear goal of making money, either as a full-time entrepreneur or as a side hustle. The cast of characters of our Kumanovo investigation included a military officer, a policeman and a trucker, and as reporting from my hosts showed, one of the key figures in the movement was a local lawyer named Trajche Arsov who built a network of sites targeting American conservatives with the help of local aqcuaintances and even American freelance writers.
I was told that even today most Macedonians with IT skills are regularly approached by friends and acquaintances asking if they are interested in making some money on the side by helping with dodgy website projects. The days of the ad-filled Wordpress blog with stolen copy-pasted content promoted through Facebook posts is definitely over.
For one thing, it has become much harder for link posts to go viral on that platform (which is why these days you often see links being promoted in the first comment under a post). At the same time the advent of ChatGPT and other LLMs have made it much easier to generate "content" that doesn't get you dinged for plagiarism or copyright infringement and which .
The Veles and Kumanovo "clickers" are definitely still active, but they have expanded or moved their activities to other areas: online scams, crypto, dropshipping, AI slop and more. When X recently added a feature that would show the supposed location where an account was logging in from, several "American" political accounts were suddenly revealed to be from Macedonia. Some people may believe this will put a stop to these kinds of accounts but as we know from Meta's platforms (where this feature has existed for years) it barely makes a difference: the people falling for this kind of content generally don't check the "about" page before liking or sharing something.
The new X feature also showed lots of pseudo-American accounts were actually from places like Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, the Philippines or Nigeria. As one of our recent stories showed, Vietnam is currently a hotbed of websites and Facebook pages spreading AI generated stories about U.S. celebrities, athletes and politicians. So from the point of view of the Macedonians the international competition seems to be getting stiffer. But there is nothing new under the sun there: in 2018 Lead Stories found a fake news network run by a folk musician from Ghana and in 2017 we found a technically sophisticated network of sites in the Philippines that was specialized in celebrity death hoaxes.
If all of this shows anything it is that the need for fact checking remains greater than ever: somebody needs to keep pointing out that not all these things on the internet are actually true.
