The Foreign Fake News Forgery Foundry

I've just read an article on how some teenagers in Macedonia made money off of advertisements on websites with stolen, sensational political news. It was fairly interesting, and, dare I say, somewhat inspiring. Focusing on a man aliased as Boris, the article describes his ascent to (relative) wealth by abusing the American right-wing and the Presidential elections going on at the time. He would create dozens of political websites and paste over stolen articles because he himself wasn't too good at English. Then, with extremely cheaply bought Facebook accounts (with American accounts reportedly going for a mere fifty cents), he would circulate these articles throughout right wing groups to get views, and by extension, clicks on his advertisements, making him money. This netted him exponentially more money than a standard job in the region would have at that time, due to economic troubles. Though this subject of running fake news websites is rather negative, the article does it's best to show why Boris and his friends went down this route. If the article were trying to push a point, it might not have included information about Macedonia's economic troubles at all. Instead, the readers know that Boris did it to get ahead, and to be able to afford the things he wanted such as better clothes, which he otherwise would not have been able to receive due to his former status as an unemployed high school student. Even so,the article makes the point that despite these Macedonian teenagers seeing the elections as a source of profit they had no personal stake in, their efforts could have had a very real influence on its outcome. It's mildly disconcerting knowing that events could possibly be influenced by people who don't even care about its outcome and are doing so only to make a few bucks. Yet, a part of me admires their motivation, and kind of wants to make money this way too.