MAGA Macedonia

Renee Diresta:

The cleanest way to understand what’s happening on X is to go back in time to Veles, Macedonia in 2016.

A group of teenagers figured out they could make money by driving Americans to websites plastered with ads. They spun up WordPress sites, wrote clickbait headlines, and pushed links into Facebook groups and Pages.

At first they tried a mix of content: generic viral junk, memes, and politics. They worked on sensational stories about the Democrats fighting it out in the caustic 2016 primary: some Bernie things, some Hillary things.

Then they tried pro-Trump stories. The numbers went crazy.

They watched the metrics: Conservative users were more likely to click and share the links, and visit the sites. They A/B tested the headlines: Every time they made the stories a little more outrageous—“Pope Endorses Donald Trump —the engagement went up.

So they made more. Soon entire towns were getting rich.

The Macedonian teenagers didn’t care about the politics. The American right, especially the emerging MAGA ecosystem, was simply a dream customer: highly engaged, highly inflamed, and extremely willing to click through to garbage sites that paid out ad revenue.