Two guys with laptops make gigabucks creating fake news
Duo ‘frames’ stories for clicks and millions of Facebook hits from Trump supporters
LONG BEACH, CALIF.— Fewer than 2,000 readers are on his website when Paris Wade, 26, awakens from a nap, reaches for his laptop and thinks he needs to, as he puts it, “feed” his audience.
“Man, no one is covering this TPP thing,” he says after seeing an article suggesting that President Barack Obama wants to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership before he leaves office. Wade, a modern-day digital opportunist, sees an opportunity. He begins typing a story. “CAN’T TRUST OBAMA,” he writes as the headline, then pauses. His audience hates Obama and loves president-elect Donald Trump, and he wants to capture that disgust and cast it as a drama between good and evil. He resumes typing: “Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back ...”
Ten minutes and nearly 200 words later, he is done with a story that is all opinion, innuendo and rumour. He types at the bottom, “Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country,” publishes the story to his website, LibertyWritersNews.com, and pulls up the Facebook page he uses to promote the site, which in six months has collected 805,000 followers and brought in tens of millions of views. “WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!” He looks at a nearby monitor that shows the site’s analytics, and watches as the readers pour in.
“Down with the globalists,” writes a woman in Cape Girardeau, Mo., one of 3,192 people now on the website, 1,244 of whom are reading the story he just posted.
“Down with the globalists!” writes a man in Las Vegas. Now 1,855 are reading the story. “DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS !!!” writes a woman in Helena, Mont. Now 1,982. At a time of continuing discussion over the role that hyperpartisan websites, fake news and social media play in the divided America of 2016, LibertyWritersNews illustrates how websites can use Facebook to tap into a surging ideology, quickly go from nothing to influencing millions of people and make big profits in the process.
Six months ago, Wade and his business partner, Ben Goldman, were unemployed restaurant workers. Now they’re at the helm of a website that gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone and say they are making so much money that they feel uncomfortable talking about it because they don’t want people to start asking for loans.
Instead, Wade hums a hip-hop song and starts a new post as readers keep reading, sharing and sending in personal messages. One comes from a woman who frequently contacts his page. “YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE I TRUST TO REPORT THE TRUTH,” is one of the things she has written, and Wade doesn’t need to look at her Facebook profile to have a clear sense of who she is. White. Working class. Midwestern. “And the economy screwed her.”
He writes another headline, “THE TRUTH IS OUT! The Media Doesn’t Want You To See What Hillary Did After Losing ...”
“Nothing in this article is anti-media, but I’ve used this headline a thousand times,” he says. “Violence and chaos and aggressive wording is what people are attracted to.”
“Our audience does not trust the mainstream media,” Goldman, 26, says a little later as Wade keeps typing. “It’s definitely easier to hook them with that.”
“There’s not a ton of thought put into it,” Wade says. “Other than it frames the story so it gets a click.” “True,” Goldman says. “We’re the new yellow journalists,” Wade will say after a day and night when the number of people following LibertyWritersNews on Facebook will swell by more than 20,000. “We’re the people on the side of the street yelling that the world is about to end.” An itinerant lifestyle
Everything about the lives of Wade and Goldman has the flimsy feel of something that can be taken apart in a matter of hours, boxed up and carted away, from the fake bylines they use — Wade is Paris Swade; Goldman is Danny Gold — right down to the rental they found on Airbnb. It is stripped of accoutrements, except for some clothes strewn across the bedroom floors, a pair of laptops and a PlayStation 4.
They say they plan on spending two more months here and don’t know where they’ll be after that. Every evening, they write stories on the couch, watch them go viral, schedule more for morning, head off to bed, and now, on another morning, comes Goldman, creaking down the steps.
He sits on the couch, logs onto an advertiser’s website and looks up how much money they’ve nonetheless made.
“Super great election sales,” he says. “All of the candidates put their super PAC money into it, so there were some days where we were getting $13, $14 per 1,000 views.” Between June and August, they say, when they had fewer than150,000 Facebook followers, they made between $10,000 and $40,000 every month running advertisements that, among other things, promised acne solutions, Via- gra alternatives, ways to remove lip lines, cracked feet and “deep fat,” as well as “the 13 sexiest and most naked celebrity selfies.”
Then the political drama deepened, and their audience expanded fivefold, and now Goldman sometimes thinks that what he made in the past six months would have taken him 20 years waiting tables at his old job. Wade and Goldman now have a lawyer and an accountant, employ other writers and are expanding so quickly that they’re surprised to think the majority of their adult lives were spent scraping by.
They graduated from the University of Tennessee — Wade in 2012 with an advertising degree and Goldman in 2013 with a business degree — but could only find unpaid internships and ended up working at a Mexican restaurant.
Neither thought much about politics. Raised in liberal homes, they both voted for Obama twice, but as they struggled to find better jobs, they began to doubt those votes, their college education and the progressive values with which they were raised.
The first story Wade did aggregated a South Korean news report that claimed an anonymous source had said that a North Korean scientist had defected with data from human experiments. He found what he recalls was a “totally misleading” photograph of a fleshy mass and made it the featured image. He wrote the headline, “(PROOF) N. Korea Experiments on Humans,” published the story and made $120 off10 minutes of work.
It was, he says, a revelation: “You have to trick people into reading the news.”
Explicitly telling people to prove that they support Trump by sharing their stories works, so they do that.
Neither of them is particularly religious, but their readers are, so in their writing they ask God to bless the president-elect, and that works, too. So does exaggeration: “OBAMA BIRTH SECRETS REVEALED! The Letters From His Dad Reveal Something Sinister . . .” And stoking fear: “Terrorists Have Infiltrated the US Government! Look Who They Want to ASSASSINATE!!”
“All successful journalism has shock value,” Goldman says as he and Wade sit at their computers later that day.
“There was once a lot more compe- tition among newspapers,” Wade says. “It was like a race to see who could write the craziest s---.”
“And whoever wrote the craziest s--- won,” Goldman says.
“There used to be a joke that every single day a new world war started,” Wade says. “Because that’s what sold papers.” Writing for an audience There are times when Wade wonders what it would be like to write an article he truly believes in.
“In a perfect world,” he says, it would have nuance and balance and long paragraphs and take longer than 10 minutes to compose. It would make people think.
But he never writes it, he says, because no one would click on it, so what would be the point?
Wade writes about a rumour he has seen on Fox News’ website, which says “the new batch of anti-Trump protesters has been bankrolled by individuals like billionaire liberal activist George Soros and groups like Moveon.org.”
Goldman, meanwhile, is typing a story — “It was a literal Hell Storm at DNC headquarters today” — and laughing at what he has written.
“God, I just know everything about this statement is so wrong,” he says, and adds, still laughing, “What is a hell storm?”
He finishes it as Wade is putting an old headline on his story about Soros, one that has nothing to do with what he has written but once brought in a lot of page views. Goldman scans through what Wade had written. “When are we going to go after this traitor!” it says. “It is time to take this traitor out! He should be pursued to the depths of hell and beyond.”
He looks up and smiles nervously. “Maybe there’s a less violent way to say that.”
“I’m going to change that one, actually,” Wade says, suddenly looking panicked as he grabs his laptop and moves to replace “take this traitor out” to “take this traitor down.”
“Down is so much better sounding than out,” Goldman says.
But the comments are already coming in fast. “Arrest and hang him for war crimes,” one woman writes of Soros. “I gladly volunteer to take this Traitor to America out,” another says. “Jail is way too good for him.”
Goldman and Wade often tell each other they aren’t creating anything that’s not already there, that they’re simply fanning it, that readers know not to take their hyperbole and embellishments seriously. And even if the comments suggest otherwise, they try not to pay them too much attention.
People will say anything on Facebook, they remind themselves. They tell one another they’re only minor participants in a broader “meme war” between outlets such as The Other 98% on the left and Nation In Distress on the right, but then they see the protests in the streets, the divisions in America, and wonder if their work is making things worse.
What if one of their readers actually does harm Soros? Would they be complicit? Is their website dangerous? Or is it savvy entrepreneurship? Their opportunity?
And if it is opportunity, how far can they go with it?