Pro-Trump fake news earned vastly more ad revenue than pro-Clinton content

Evidence

A good deal of fake news in the 2016 election originated from the Balkans and other parts of Eastern Europe. On November 25, 2016, the New York Times ran a story headlined: “Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All about Income.’” Here we learn about Beqa Latsabidze, a struggling university student from Tbilisi, Georgia, who was living with two roommates and trying to make a little cash off Google ads. He claims that at first he posted positive stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for the cash to roll in, but it didn’t work. Then he started to do the same for Donald Trump and found a gold mine. “It’s all Trump … people go nuts for it,” he said. “My audience likes Trump … I don’t want to write bad things about Trump. If I write fake stories about Trump, I lose my audience.” So he doubled down on the Hillary-bashing and favorable tales about Trump and made thousands of dollars. His most lucrative story was pure fiction: that the Mexican government had announced they would close their border to Americans if Trump won the White House. When pressed, Latsabidze said that he had no political motive; he was just following the money. He also professed amazement that anyone would mistake anything he had written for real news. “Nobody really believes that Mexico is going to close the border.” In fact, he said that he didn’t think of what he did as “fake news” at all, but instead saw it as “satire.” — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 214

Categorization

• CANDY: The Georgian student who made thousands peddling absurd pro-Trump fiction, genuinely shocked anyone believed it, and called it ‘satire’ — a compact, tweetable parable of 2016 fake news.
• QUESTION: The profit asymmetry — pro-Trump fabricated content massively out-earning pro-Clinton — is itself a striking empirical fact worth chasing for audience-psychology or algorithmic explanation.
• XREF: connects to: Most 2016 election fake news stories favored Trump over Clinton by a wide margin — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 516; Veles fake-news writers chose Trump purely for profit — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 484; Political impact of fake news is independent of its creators’ actual motives — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 217

Broader Connections

• Veles fake-news writers chose Trump purely for profit #corroborates (0.85) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 484
• Political impact of fake news is independent of its creators’ actual motives #complicates (0.75) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 217