Exclusive: Russia used Google and its advertisers to fund propaganda efforts in the 2016 election.
You’ve likely never heard of Veles. The tiny town of 55,000 people lies deep in Macedonia, a landlocked country nestled between Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. Macedonia has struggled to kickstart its economy since independence in 1991. The resulting high unemployment and a teenage population with a fair command of English, made Veles an unlikely centre of production for fake news during the 2016 election.
Two years ago, a cadre of Macedonian teenage web entrepreneurs began creating and publishing pro-Trump fake news content directed at a U.S. audience. Some of the teens were recruited via gaming forums or micro-work sites but they don’t seem to have had a direct connection to the Trump campaign or Russian intelligence, except for the curious feature that only their pro-Trump fake news found an audience.
Some of the fake news websites looked very similar to the sites of the New York T…
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