Propaganda goes viral

“I don’t believe what I read in the papers, they’re just out to capture my dime.” – Paul Simon, Have a good time While propaganda is as old as time and political stakeholders have used the internet to spread their messages since the web’s early days, in 2016 propaganda went viral. It was also monetized in an arguably new way, further highlighting the need for readers to check their sources – and the motivations behind those sources – before making decisions. Fake news isn’t new, but it was a lucrative business during last year’s US Presidential election. Executive hasn’t found an exact figure for how much revenue the operators of fake news websites earned, but one US “publisher” claimed in an November 2016 interview with the Washington Post that, “right now I make like $10,000 a month from [Google] AdSense.” No shortage of US news outlets traveled to Macedonia late