When Frances Haugen joined Facebook to combat its fake news crisis, she was staggered at the scale of the problem.

Here, in the second part of her compelling memoir, she reveals how little the tech giant really did to stamp out the lies — and why she risked everything to be a whistleblower . . .

The picturesque small town of Veles, North Macedonia, was once the fake news capital of the world. More misinformation flowed out of that little community, and more Facebook dollars flowed in than anyone could imagine.

It was the brainchild of Macedonian entrepreneur Mirko Ceselkoski, who, as far back as 2011, set up a school training local people on how to build low-quality websites which aped what American Facebook users expected a 'news outlet' to look like.

The community reached its apogee in 2016 during the U.S. presidential elections, with more than 100 fake news sites, overwhelmingly promoting Trump, blasting out lies following a very simple and specific formula:

FRANCES HAUGEN (pictured): That election year was a watershed for Facebook and fake news, not because of the efforts of the Macedonians (though they didn't help) but because of a phenomenon we called 'narrowcasting'

Online brainwashing due to fake news as an image of Woodstock festival (left) and fake U.S. election news (right) circulated

TRENDING

Zuckerberg denies that he was choked out during Jiu-Jitsu tournament 34.1k viewing now Texas dad 'lost in the woods' for a week was found mentally 'depleted' 5.2k...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMijQFodHRwczovL3d3dy5kYWlseW1haWwuY28u...