Bendiksen set out to capture disinformation producers in a small Macedonian town. He ended up revealing uncomfortable truths about his own profession.” Veles is a provincial town in North Macedonia that was put on the world map in 2016 as the epicenter of fake news production. The area has lost much of its economic base in recent Decades: A massive steel foundry, porcelain factory, and other industries lie abandoned.During the 2016 US presidential election, local tech-savvy youth created hundreds of click-baiting websites posing as American political news portals, intending to make a quick buck from viewers' ad clicks.As Veles' fake news articles spread to millions of people via Facebook and Twitter algorithms, many Some of these "news hackers" made substantial sums, and the sites may well have contributed to the election of Donald Trump as president of The US story of the Veles fake news producers is an example of how misinformation and “alternative truths” are an ever-growing force and one not easy to defeat. I traveled to Veles to explore this unlikely hub of disinformation. Contemporary Veles photographs are intertwined with excerpts and facsimiles from a 1919 archaeological discovery also called the "Book of Veles": a cryptic collection of 40 "ancient" wooden tablets discovered in Russia by an army officer, written in a Proto-Slavic language. . . It was said to be a story of the Slavic people and of the god Veles himself, the pre-Christian Slavic god of mischief, chaos and deceit. While popular with Slavic nationalists, the text is discredited as a forgery by most scientists. In Book of Veles, these two different stories of 'Veles' are intertwined with each other, representing the current and historical efforts to produce misinformation and chaos.
22x16cm
148 pages
Hard cover
third impression
English
