One of the Macedonian fake news kingpins who drove conservative outrage clicks for cash in 2016 is back and cashing in on the coronavirus and 2020 controversy.
Unfortunately, American media outlets and readers seem none the wiser, as at least one outlet associated with him fooled organizations like Fox News and The Washington Post into believing it was a local ABC affiliate.
Teodor Mircevski got his start working for small-time e-commerce and freelance sites in the mid-2010s but found his niche during the 2016 election, registering partisan sites like donaldtrumpnews.net and a liberal news aggregator aimed at capitalizing on American readers’ interest in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
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He was just one of many young Macedonians who found employment and big salaries in the burgeoning business of “fake news.” Now his sites are amplifying coronavirus misinformation and Rudy Giuliani’s attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, and delving into controversies over the 2020 election.
Site-registration information from the DomainTools database shows an address for Mircevski in Veles, Macedonia, a town that became notorious as ground zero for the country’s fake-news industry. As Russian trolls played to either end of the American political spectrum in a bid to sow chaos and boost Trump’s electoral chances, Macedonian teens from Veles used the same methods purely to harvest ad dollars.
Mircevski did not respond to multiple text messages, phone calls, and emails from The Daily Beast requesting comment.
At a casual glance, ABC14News looks like one of dozens of local affiliates for ABC’s national network of local news sites. If its penchant for articles written in stilted English or plagiarizing from the likes of Fox News, The Blaze, and Breitbart doesn’t clue readers in that something’s not right, the fact that ABC has no affiliate by that name should.
The site lists a fake address for the purported affiliate in Denver, generated by an application designed to create phony profiles to test data-loss-prevention tools. The names of the fake site’s purported contributors appear to have been created by the same app.
A search of the site’s domain name system records in RiskIQ’s database shows a Gmail address affiliated with Mircevski.
ABC14News first gained attention when it was one of a handful of fake network affiliates that pushed a viral false story about a woman in Morgantown, West Virginia, supposedly shooting and killing a pedophile attempting to assault her daughter. The story racked up so many views that the Morgantown sheriff had to inform the press that it was a fake and that a police car featured in a photo accompanying it hadn’t been in service for years.
Fake NBC and CBS affiliate sites that pushed the Morgantown pedophile vigilante story have since been shuttered, but ABC14News has soldiered on, racking up thousands of engagements on Facebook with plagiarized and poorly written content—and fooled a handful of legitimate outlets in the process.
A recent Washington Post opinion piece praising the Sanders campaign for its Muslim outreach and criticizing Joe Biden, a Fox News article on New York’s coronavirus lockdown, and an Amnesty International piece on the Trump administration’s designation of gun vendors as essential businesses all linked to ABC14news pieces as though they were original reporting from a legitimate local news outlet.
The site has even waded into the 2020 election and sexual-assault allegations against former Biden, garnering some suspicion in the process.
Mircevski’s fake-news empire extends beyond the phony ABC affiliate, and his sites have ventured into stoking coronavirus misinformation and partisan outrage. He doesn’t appear in site-registration databases for ConservativeFighters.org or AmericanPatriotDaily.com, but an errant post with his name and phone number for a payment processor and a freelance ad for web-design help confirm Mircevski’s involvement with the sites.
The sites have dug hard into coronavirus conspiracy theories, including Giuliani’s attempt to link Anthony Fauci to a Wuhan lab that conservative pundits have claimed, without evidence, is the source of the coronavirus outbreak, pivoting off the fringe Gateway Pundit’s piece. “American Patriot News” takes a slightly more original approach to its coronavirus misinformation but at the cost of an even fainter grasp on the facts and American politics. The site has tried to frame Attorney General Bill Barr’s (now walked-back) threats to sue states over quarantine restrictions as a threat to liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and claimed that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s early comments will undermine Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (nonexistent) presidential campaign chances.
Absurd as the sites are, a search of the CrowdTangle show articles from Conservative Fighters routinely rack up hundreds of likes per post among right-wing fan pages.
The fake-news business is apparently a lucrative one for Mircevski, who rose from affiliate marketing and e-commerce work into the world of fake news. In a post on the blackhatworld forum, he claimed to be making “$5000+ a day” in 2017.
“It took me two years of working 16+ hours a day and investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in Facebook paid ads,” he wrote on the forum, while lamenting that Facebook had closed his account.
