Pro-Trump news, for fame and profit

Hi, it’s Davey in New York. A conservative website with a founder from Macedonia has flourished on alternative social networks. But first... [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi, it’s Davey in New York. A conservative website with a founder from Macedonia has flourished on alternative social networks. But first... Today’s must-reads: • Alphabet’s [life sciences unit Verily]( raises $1 billion and shakes up its leadership team • Roblox announced [plans to introduce ads]( next year • The video game industry still has a lot to learn about [excessive overtime]( Right-wing content, Macedonian roots Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A hyperpartisan website with ties to foreign actors spread divisive and misleading news about the US election and built a formidable audience online, exploiting existing fractures in American politics to attract attention and ad revenue. It sounds like old news. In 2016, we heard about [Macedonian teens]( who created hundreds of pro-Trump Facebook pages. Later, the federal government revealed that Russia had [meddled]( in the 2016 US presidential election using social media. But in the intervening years, tech giants have poured billions into combating misinformation—especially foreign misinformation—on their services. Although their enforcement was uneven at times, the measures largely worked. The misinformation that spread during the 2020 election cycle mostly came from within the US. That’s why a new incident is so unusual, and troubling. A website linked to a Macedonian native was quickly reported in 2020, and kicked off the major platforms. But now it’s back, and it has built a massive following on so-called alt tech spaces—platforms like Truth Social, Gettr, Gab and Rumble. Hyperbolic and partisan headlines from the new version of the site have circulated on mainstream social media services like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. The site, called Resist the Mainstream, was first [exposed]( by the Election Integrity Partnership in October 2020 for spreading hyperpartisan news while hiding its foreign origins. Its founder, Rumen Naumovski, is [reportedly]( a contemporary of the group of teenagers from Veles, North Macedonia, who created hundreds of Facebook pages, often favorable to Donald Trump, during the 2016 US presidential election—with many of those pages spreading false information. Resist the Mainstream became temporarily defunct after the Election Integrity Partnership report, but according to new research reviewed by Bloomberg News from open source researcher Nathan Doctor, it tweaked its website design, changed its domain to resistthemainstream.org (instead of .com) in February 2021, and is still live today. The domain change may have helped the site’s stories stay on networks like Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and on Twitter Inc.—though Twitter has limited users’ ability to post its links. Today, most of Naumovski’s writers, editors and staffers in marketing and development are based in the US, according to Doctor—which may be another reason Resist the Mainstream has largely flown under the radar of popular social media services that often look for activity from accounts based outside of the US to find and root out inauthentic behavior. Facebook and Instagram don’t host any accounts for the group, but some of its content has circulated on the platforms. After Bloomberg contacted Meta about Resist the Mainstream, the company said it disabled accounts opened by Naumovski that were linked to its previous .com website for violating its policies against [coordinated inauthentic behavior](. The company also said that the number of Facebook posts that link to the group’s revised .org website was comparatively low, and that it had downranked some of its articles on the Facebook news feed. Twitter said it enforces its [Covid-19 misleading information policy]( and [civic integrity policy]( against the links of third-party websites when the content on those sites would violate its policies. Twitter did not comment on Resist the Mainstream specifically, but the platform does block links to the site. TikTok banned Resist the Mainstream’s account for “multiple violations” of its community guidelines after Bloomberg reached out. Much of the Resist the Mainstream’s content is on the edge of what platforms typically allow. Recent headlines cast doubt on US election integrity, including, “Watch: Mike Lindell Warns: ‘They’re Going To Try’ To ‘Steal’ Elections This Fall’” and “FBI 2020 Election Meddling Takes Center Stage As Director Chris Wray Readies Senate Testimony.” The outlet has also repeatedly published stories citing the benefits of Ivermectin, which scientists have said is not an effective treatment for Covid-19, and has repeated claims that vaccines are harmful or toxic. Naumovski pushed back on the characterization of Resist the Mainstream as misleading, and said its election and vaccine reporting was accurate. “Our job is to probe for the truth, not squish our reporting into what we ‘know’ the truth must be,” he wrote in a message. Over the past two years, the outlet generated about 820,000 likes and shares on Facebook and 66,000 on Twitter (largely before the platform limited its links). That in turn has helped the main website pull in around 1.5 million monthly page views, according to [data]( from SimilarWeb. But the real power behind Resist the Mainstream comes from alternative-tech platforms, where its profiles have a combined follower count of [more than 1 million](. In March, Kaelan Dorr, the vice president of marketing and engagement at Gettr, [wrote](: “Having a ton of fun watching @ResistTM grow on here—definitely a worthy follow!” On Gettr, the site has nearly 100,000 followers. According to research from Doctor, Resist the Mainstream makes money from the online advertising companies Criteo, MGID and Decide (formerly called LockerDome), which serve up programmatic ads on its website. This, at least in part, allowed Naumovski to [donate]( $2,900—the maximum allowed amount by an individual contributor under FEC guidelines—to the congressional campaign of Ron Watkins, the conspiracy theorist best known for being a former administrator of 8chan and widely believed to be the “Q” figure in the QAnon conspiracy movement. The rise of the conspiracy-laden website created by this young Macedonian is a cautionary tale. It’s also an indication of just how intractable the misinformation problem on social media will be, especially ahead of the 2022 US midterm elections. Even as the biggest tech companies make strides on the issue, the players, their tactics and the loopholes they exploit are always shifting under their feet. —[Davey Alba](mailto:malba13@bloomberg.net) The big story Amazon sellers fear a “scary” holiday season as consumers pull back. Merchants on the site worry they’ll have to cut prices, with [US online sales growth]( projected to be in the single digits for the first time on record. What else you need to know As Chinese consumers curb their spending in a pandemic-stricken economy, e-commerce giant [Pinduoduo is emerging]( as a clear stock-market winner. Bitcoin rallied the most since July, breaking out of the [narrowest trading range]( in about two years. London-based Revolut is launching a one-click payment feature in a [bid to rival PayPal]( at online checkouts. Google pays “enormous” sums to maintain its [search-engine dominance](, the Justice Department told a judge last week. Twitter paid its whistle-blower $7 million to secure his silence in public, [according to a lawyer for Elon Musk](. 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