From Kumanovo to Skopje: Revisiting Macedonian Fake‑News Networks and the New Face of Misinformation

I accepted an invitation last month to travel to North Macedonia to meet fact‑checkers and journalists at the Metamorphosis Foundation and to discuss Lead Stories' work producing automatically generated short‑form fact‑checking videos. I had wanted to visit since 2019, when I helped investigate a network of fake‑news websites centered in the town of Kumanovo. The trip gave me a chance to see Kumanovo and Veles in person and to assess how the misinformation landscape there has changed.

Background: The Kumanovo Network and Veles

In 2019, Lead Stories, together with Peter Burger at the Dutch fact‑checking site Nieuwscheckers.nl, published a series exposing a Macedonian operation that copied and amplified inflammatory — and often false — stories to generate ad revenue. One article, "The Kumanovo‑connection: Macedonian Spam Clans Still Make Money With Fake News About Muslims and Migrants," documented dozens of ad‑heavy sites run by local operators. Our reporting identified a range of ordinary locals involved in the enterprise — a trucker, a policeman and even a military officer among them.

After the exposé the Kumanovo network largely disappeared: dozens of sites were shut down or went dormant. That operation was part of a wider pattern in Macedonia, where towns such as Veles became synonymous with ad‑driven click farms. International reporting in 2016 highlighted how teenagers in Veles ran more than 100 sites spreading politically charged stories — actions driven more by revenue than coherent ideology, and raising questions about platform algorithms and incentives.

What I Saw in Skopje

Skopje itself showed a physical transformation: newly renovated squares, brighter lighting and statues dotting the downtown. Conversations with local fact‑checkers confirmed what our reporting suggested — the actors remain, but the playbook has changed. Macedonians with IT skills still receive offers to help with questionable online projects, but the old model of ad‑filled WordPress link farms amplified via Facebook virality is no longer as effective.

How Tactics Have Evolved

Several forces have shifted the misinformation ecosystem:

• Platform Changes: Social platforms have altered how link posts spread; link virality is harder to achieve, prompting some operators to hide links in comments or change posting patterns.
• New Technologies: Large language models such as ChatGPT make it easier to produce large volumes of plausible‑looking content that avoids obvious plagiarism, while lowering barriers for low‑quality or misleading output (often called "AI slop").
• Business Model Shifts: Operators moved into online scams, crypto schemes, dropshipping, affiliate marketing and AI‑generated stories rather than relying solely on ad revenue from clickbait.
• Globalization of Operations: Location‑revealing features recently added to platforms exposed that many accounts presented as U.S.‑based were actually managed from places such as Macedonia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, the Philippines and Nigeria — showing the activity is global and competitive.

Lead Stories' past investigations underscore that this is not unique to Macedonia: in 2018 we found a network run by a folk musician in Ghana, and in 2017 a technically sophisticated Philippine network specialized in celebrity death hoaxes. More recently, Vietnam has surfaced as a hotbed of AI‑generated celebrity and political stories.

Why Fact‑Checking Still Matters

As platforms change and bad actors adapt their tactics and geography, independent verification remains crucial.

Even as the specific tactics evolve, the core problem persists: people and groups will exploit social platforms and new tools to produce misleading content — whether for ad revenue, political influence or outright fraud. That means continued, adaptive fact‑checking is essential to identify falsehoods, explain context, and help platforms and the public respond effectively.

Bottom line: The old Kumanovo click farms faded after exposure, but the people behind them have not necessarily stopped — they have diversified. Understanding how tactics shift, and why they work, is vital for keeping misinformation in check.