[Senator Clay Davis]

The more I read about fake news, the more I want in. Sounds like some of the easiest money made, and if you know how to really push the buttons and tie several conspiracies together, you could probably really clean up. Also shows what a pariah social media really is.

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 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 rumor. 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 then 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 page views. “WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!” Then 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.

“Super great election sales,” he says. “There were some days where we were getting $13, $14 per 1,000 views.” Between June and August, they say, when they had fewer than 150,000 Facebook followers, they made between $10,000 and $40,000 every month running advertisements that, among other things, promised acne solutions, Viagra alternatives, ways to remove lip lines, cracked feet, “deep fat,” and “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 last 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. On weekends, they would sell water bottles at college football games, and Goldman scalped tickets. 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.

They moved to California, first Wade, then Goldman, and started an advertising business that quickly failed. But it did attract one client who ran numerous alt-right Facebook pages. He needed more writers, and in 2015 Wade and Goldman started doing stories and getting paid based on how many clicks they got. 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. Wade knew he needed a picture to sell the story to readers. He searched online for an image of a human experiment that, as he describes it, would make people think, “What is that? I got to click.” 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 off 10 minutes of work. It was, he says, a revelation: “You have to trick people into reading the news.”

Now settled into the career that has grown from that revelation, Wade turns the television to Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist with nearly 1.4 million followers on Facebook, who is the opportunist they would most like to become. Wade clicks on the LibertyWritersNews site, which says at the bottom, “You Can Count On Liberty Writers News,” begins typing a new story, and looks up to watch Jones yell into the camera. But it isn’t Jones’s monologue that Wade notices. It’s his setup. “We want to start filming in a studio like that,” Wade says. “That stuff works on Facebook.”

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?

Instead, as 4,000 people are on the website one night, Wade and Goldman keep writing and feeding, writing and feeding.

Wade writes about a rumor he has seen on Fox News’s 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.”

“Dude,” Wade says. “The left has been, like, manufacturing the protest.”

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. He shares it on their Facebook page and watches as readers stream into the website — first a few hundred, then nearly 1,000.

“Boom, dude, look at that,” Wade says. “That one is doing super well.”

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. “This man should go straight to F@#KING HELL,” another woman posts. “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% (other98.com) on the left and Nation In Distress (facebook.com/NationInDistress) 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?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...mepage%2Fstory