He Sparked the Fake News Boom. Then Facebook Broke His Business

a news site called Mr Conservative dot com. The plan was to use Facebook to get tons of traffic to his website and then to turn that traffic into add dollars. That required resorting to some controversial tactics. There was a vast market of Wall Street journal like Fox News, sort of boring headlines, and I was the first one that sort of pushed the envelope. Now, there are certain ideals that a lot of journalists as included. We'll say we

live by things being unbiased and accurate. Cyrus essentially through that all out of the window. He gave his conservative readers what he believed they actually wanted. We know that the title has to be tilted. We know that we have to exclude the facts because if we say anything good about the opponent, then people are like, oh, you're liberals, your closet liberals. So there is no room to be objective,

there is no room to deliver quality. The market has always responded, now give me garbage, give me outrage, give me you know, a quickbait. Mr conservative dot Com was an instant success, and over the years it only got bigger. The site ended up amassing a billion page views in its lifetime, and all those eyeballs meant that Cyrus was finally rich, or at least richer than he ever was as a kid. But one day Cyrus realized that his creation had gone too far and he had a monster

on his hands. His sight at snowballed into a phenomenon that we've all been taught thinking about for a year now. So I sort of view myself as a patient zero fake news. Hi. I'm aki Ito, and I'm Sarah Fryer, and this week on Decrypted, we're bringing you the story of Cyrus's quest for partisan influence online. It wasn't necessarily about pushing an agenda. It definitely wasn't about the Russians.

It was mostly about making money. Cyrus learned what makes people click and share and taught a lot of other people to build blood sites like his, to the point where things spiraled out of control ahead of Trump's election. After Facebook started cracking down on fake news, Cyrus shifting gears. Now he's focused on building a site that's less vitriolic, although he's worried the social network's new roles might crush his next projects. Anyway, stay with us, So, Sarah, the

first time you talked to Cyrus was right after the election. Yeah. I had been emailing websites that were spreading fake news, curious about how they ran their businesses and how they felt about their impact on Trump's victory. Nobody wanted to talk. A couple of them forwarded my email to Cirius and he reached out, saying he could speak for several publishers

at once. A lot has changed since then, new details on Russian interference in the election and how it ties to Facebook ad People get their news from social media, with Facebook being the top social media news source on Capitol Hill. Tech giants Google, Facebook, and Twitter Septis testify on how their platforms were used by Russian groups during the election campaign, and all of this has had big consequences for Cyrus's business, which is why we drove out

to Napa to go meet the guy. Are we alive, We're just we're just talking. We're warming up. Cyrus is twenty six years old and lives at his family vineyard with his mother. Now that sounds luxurious, but he said it can actually be pretty boring. His relationship with the media started a decade earlier in high school in Marwin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I was a loner. I was bullied. Uh, I never had

any friends. All I ever wanted to do was be rich because I grew up in Bay Area and everybody else was rich. And although my family was rich, my grandparents were rich, my mother was a single mother, and I had to move around a lot, I think ten times. And then, like, you know, your friends all living like a five to ten million dollar house, and you can feel very poor. So it's very easy to build up a lot of resentment and become a contrarian. And that's

what happened. One day when he was a senior in high school, all that resentment bubbled up into a screed he wrote criticizing people in the County for what he saw as hypocrisy. He said, they would say they're open minded, but they didn't like his conservative ideas. He published a paper called the Deadwood Barf, a play on his high school newspaper that was called the Redwood Bark. It gave his own take on gay marriage, environmentalism, and his fellow residence.

It was pretty offensive, and the school suspended Cyrus for five days. It became a spectacle covered in the local news. At age seventeen, Cyrus got to go on the radio and give quotes to local papers. I found that I am in love with the media. I love politics, I love debate, I love argument, and I decided that controversy was my forteme. Controversy was also how he was going to become rich. Cyrus went to college and Facebook started to catch on. He learned everything he could about how

it made information spread. Back then, people weren't really sharing news on Facebook, but they were selling t shirts. Cyrus started selling t shirts with conservative slogans on them. That was his first attempt at building a wider community of people who cared about the issues that he did. Once IRUs figured out how to build a community through Facebook ads, he started his own news business called Mr Conservative dot Com.

His partner wanted to cater to educated people with real influence in Washington, but Cyrus he wanted to target the people who were the most profitable, people who cared less about being informed and cared more about being validated. People looking for highly partisan content that even when a step further than Fox News is willing to go. To grow his audience, he got people to like miss their Conservatives Facebook page. He purchased ads on the platform to attract

conservative readers. Facebook self service online ad buying system allows businesses to target their advertising based on people's political beliefs. This is from data Facebook collects by watching user behavior. How do you buy fans? There's a user interface Facebook dot Com slash ads, slash manager, and you create ads,

and then you create an image and advert um. So like let's say, for example, an image of Obama, and it will say like if you think Obama is the worst president ever, um for Trump, like like if you think Trump should be impeached and uh. Then you pay a price for those fans, uh, and then you retain them. You pay a heavy upfront cost per fan. But then every month, let's say you make a little bit of that back, and then the hope is is that, ok, after a year, year and a half, whatever, you pay

it off. At first, he says, he tried to make a real news site with the goal of informing people. He invested in video and long form stories, but that wasn't what actually worked to get readers. So he gave them what they wanted. So Mr Conservative was actually the first conservative, truly conservative thing on Facebook. And I understood that the people that we were appealing to were sort of breathless Fox News viewers who longed for highly partisan content,

and Cyrus finally got what he wanted. As a result, he was making tens of thousands of dollars a month. That meant that for the first time, Cyrus had a lot of money, which is what Cyrus wanted all these years, but it led to all kinds of problems for him,

both personal and professional. Within a very short period of time, I was making forty or fifty month, and that led to a lot of personal problems because when you have wanted money on your life and then all of a sudden you're making forty or fifty month, and then it lends itself to going out and doing bad things. He was partying NonStop, He crashed two mercedes, He got arrested repeatedly for being drunk in public. All that meant that Cyrus wasn't dealing with some of the problems that were

emerging in his business. It got to a point where I thought that there was no editorial value to any of the content on Mr Conservative, publishing the occasional fake story, UH, publishing misleading clickbait fairly often. UM, I think that towards the end of Mr Conservative it was extremely misleading, and uh, there was a lot of clickbait. He says he never

intend finally published fake news. He says he'd asked his editors to delete it when they found it, but everything was moving so fast and the metabolism for content was so great that there just wasn't much time to check everything. This is your sort of an accidental byproducts of the fact that you have too many people competing for too smaller the news feed, trying to outdo one another, trying

to find the most interesting stories. If you were seven days a week doing let's say fifteen stories a day, like let's say three months of that, when you come across the fake story, it doesn't look that fake to you. It's like your mind is just trained. It's like, oh that, well, I must be sure, because you know, I'm just I've in't it doing this all day. After a while, Cyrus finally got his act together, and that was when the

realization set in. I think that I started feeling bad about it in late two sixteen, But you still kept this site up. I did. Why Why Why does a lawyer do work for a client that he disagrees with? What do you think he meant by that? But people do things for a living even if they don't morally agree with it. You know, I disagreed with the editorial. I told my editor whenever we spoke how much I disagreed with it, I would tell her to run clean stuff.

We ran clean stuff. We couldn't get traffic. The site ran on all cylinders through, hitting its peak just before the US presidential election. At that point, it was making a hundred fifty thou dollars in revenue a month, with fifty thou dollars in profit. Cyrus started several other conservative sites, to which he declined to name for US. He did say that other people in the industry who had learned from him were making millions. Okay, so here's some sample

headlines from Mr Conservative dot com in October. Obama's darkest secret leaks. He never wanted us to find this. Entitled Muslim employee makes insane demand. Patriotic boss hits him back with this breaking Hillary Clinton caught a major lie. This could destroy her and then we all know what happened next.

I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us, it's about us on our victory, and I congratulated her and her family on a very very Frump's victory would alter the course of global affairs, as well as the booming business that Cyrus had created. That's coming up next. So let's pick up our story in November, right after

Trump selection. His victory surprised pretty much everyone, although Cyrus says he saw it coming, and lots of people started blaming Facebook for allowing fake news to proliferate on its platform and influence voters. Misinformation from many sources certainly had an impact on this election, and you can look at that at all kinds of levels. Remember, neutrality was also Facebook's first defense for how it pummeled users with pro Trump fake news during the general election for lots of voters.

This was when it really became clear what a wide reach these heavily partisan or fake news sites achieved on Facebook. Although Cyrus had known about the power of these kinds of stories for years and he made a lot of money from exploiting that. Do I think that I turned any votes now? I think that that's very fanciful thinking. It costs exponentially more money to reach independence, and I've

always approached it as a business model. So you know, for example, like let's say it costs five cents to target a conservatives, to target a liberal, let's to buy an independent on my cost of dollar, and they're going to visit your website lass. So the proposition of Facebook has never been to target independence. It's always been to um sort of accentuate people's already partisan views, whether you're

a liberal or a conservative. If you're somebody who gets here and news on Facebook, you're like a crazy person who only has friends just like you, or the few people who might disagree with you just disregard your views. It's not like anybody shared a story, you know, saying that the pope in doors Trump say a conservative and then a liberal read oh, the popen door Trump. Well, I'm going to go out and change my vote. Now show me one. Can the media produce one? You know,

he sounds pretty defensive there. Well, he's right that, taken in isolation, one story is unlikely to have sway. But the thing about Facebook is that people spend an average of fifty minutes there every day. That's a lot of exposure, and repetition has a strong effect over time. Also, when content is shared by friends and family, it carries much

greater weight than something you're saying see on a news website. Yeah, and I said that people who may have thought they were on the political fringes can find like minded community and feel stronger about their stance. So, for example, they might have turned out on election day for Trump when otherwise they might have worried he had no chance of winning. And Cyrus himself told us he definitely reached more people than the Russians. He told us a single conservative meme

could reach twenty million people. He estimates that Mr Conservative got about a billion page views in total over the years. Compare that with the Russian propaganda firm, the Internet Research Agency, which reached a hundred fifty million people on Facebook and Instagram combined. I spoke to Brook Minkowski, an editor at the fact checking site Snopes. Fans of the show will remember her from our episode on fake News last year. I told her how Cyrus feels. She said, she's heard

it all before. That's what they always say, that's what helps him sleep at night. Sure, you know you enjoy that while you look at your bank account. But the truth is in the aggregate. All of this stuff is dramatically affecting society for the much worse. And you know, you can kid yourself and say, well, nobody ever read it,

it didn't really affect anything. But if people shared it, they shared it to their friends and their family members who weren't perhaps well informed, or don't care to be well informed, or they're fifteen years old and they're still developing their worldviews. You know, he can't say that. That's really disingenuous of him. It is so obviously them trying to distance themselves from the damage that they have done.

I told Brooke about how Cyrus said he never intended to publish fake news, and Brooke did a search for times Snopes had written about what Mr Conservative had published. She sent me an example from October. Mr Conservative, which Snopes described back then as an unreliable website, had posted the headline warning Obama opens first concentration camp in US plans to detain conservatives. A story in had the headline

ten facts that suggests Obama's birth certificate is fake. This guy, in particular Mr Conservative was a birther or is a birth I don't know who pushed a story about Obama opening FEMA camps for political dissidents. Um. I think that he probably was never that concerned about actual news to begin with. And I've heard that particular excuse that that's what the people want for a long time. He was pushing disinformation, whether he wants to admit it or not.

And I don't care if that's what the people want. If you're gonna call yourself a journalist and say that you're dealing with journalism, you should not be putting out misinformation or disinformation or straight up propaganda. And knowingly, the public outcry after the election forced Facebook to roll out a bunch of changes to the way it prioritizes news stories on its platform. The company has been very intent on looking for signals for pages that might be low quality.

It says that they're starting to de rank them in in the news feed algorithm and make sure that people don't have a bad experience when they click on these places. And according to Cyrus, those changes had a huge impact on his business as well as his competitors. Facebook is

specifically sought to destroy the conservative sides Facebook face. Do you think Facebook tried to do that to your sides too, well, Mr Conservative, Well, of course, I mean it was annihilated, but it was not annihilated is in a profound way as some of the people who are misbehaving more than me. When Cyrus says that Mr Conservative was annihilated, he means that traffic to the site did substantially. That happened in increments's face were rolled out more and more changes that

were meant to curb fake news. You know, it's a decision between like, Okay, I'm not gonna run a garbage website, uh that is barely profitable after you know, we've had eighty eight percent of our revenues kicked out after the fake news crisis. Should I say or am I gonna run a clean website and then I'm not gonna have to pay whatever it is. You know, months just keep it up and running. This past August, Cyrus shut down

Mr conservative dot com. If you try to go to the U r L or any of the connected domains today, you get nothing. And in the months leading up to the election, he did something you might not expect. He created a new site in July last year called Truth Examiner, purchased a whole new set of bands on Facebook who identify as Democrats, and hired a team of authentically liberal editors to run it. He says he did this partly

because he was convinced Trump was gonna win. I started Truth Examiner because, uh, I have a sort of genetic need. It's just on a cellular level to oppose those in power. Anyone who's powerful needs to be challenged, regardless of their political orientation. And he would think that a site like this catering to anti Trump outrage would thrive under Trump's presidency. Cyrus worked hard to stay within the bounds of facebooks

and rules. So, you know, so we look at all the guidelines that they've published, like these are the advertisements that you should have. This is the type of content that you should produce. I literally have I have IVY League people and professors writing breaking news in the exact way that has been specified, and despite what he says were his best efforts, there was a huge drop off and how much they clicked on truth Examiner's posts that coincided with a big change Facebook rolled out to its

news feed. It's not easy being clean. I spoke to Cyrus's editor in chief his liberal wedsite, Nicole Jaynes. She said she's been intently reading Facebook's blog posts about how to play it straight, give readers high quality content, avoid click bait headline. Although I do see this headline right now. Here are the Facebook ads Trump only wants his loyal

supporters to see. They are disturbing. Disturbing in all caps. Okay, maybe she writes a few clickbait headlines, but traffic on truth Examiner has remained dismal since Facebook's crackdown in March, and Cyrus doesn't get it because he says he's playing by the rules. And it makes Cyrus mad because he still sees plenty of other sites thriving, even though they're using the same shady tactics that Facebook's reportedly cracking down

on clickbait, sensationalism, fake news. Cyrus thinks that if Facebook is giving advice on how to be a good website, their platform might need to change to actually support the people who follow it. So, Sarah, was there anything that surprised you about Cyrus's story? Well, it just goes to show that businesses, however shady, live and die on Facebook's whim. This company has an enormous amount of power to sort of dictate what we consume in media, and they don't

see themselves as the arbiter of that power. In fact, they really shy away from it. But that doesn't mean they don't have it, and it's getting stronger. Yeah, it's scary that a single company has this much power, even though we can all agree that less fake news on Facebook is a good thing, right, But I think that the way that they're wielding it is really confusing to people who just want to be successful in the platform.

I'm not saying Cyrus's business is an upstanding one, but uh, I think that the company has been trying to be a little bit more transparent with a lot of blog posts, a lot of outreach collaboration with journalistic organizations, but they still can't agree on where the gray lines are and how hard they should be pushing to curb this kind of stuff and what veers too far into the direction of being an editorial person, right And if they're too transparent,

then you end up encouraging people who are kind of like Cyrus who try to game the system again, right, Well, and people will always try to gain the system. And that's something that Facebook has been pretty open about that they see fake news and information campaigns by foreign governments. They see it is is something like like spam, or hacking or or phishing scams, like another set of of issues that a tech company has to deal with in

this day and age. So aside from the dent that Facebook has made on Cyrus's business, do you think Facebook's made serious inroads and curbing actual fake news? Well, I've been looking into that, and when it comes to stopping fake news, they have this team of fact checkers. Brooke Mnkowski is one of them. I interviewed a bunch of them a couple of weeks back, and it turns out they have this dashboard where they go through and marked

stories as true or false. But it barely scrapes the surface in terms of the amount of content that's actually on Facebook. And they're not really focusing on the biggest, most influential people like if. Cyrus says, if Facebook were had just come to him, you know, he could gather up all the other people in the industry and they couldn't have a nice little meeting in Menlo Park. Instead, they're going at it from the prospective of of taking down the stories once they're up, which will maybe take

a lot longer. For now, Cyrus says he's focused on building out Truth Examiner, which he wants to sell to a big publisher like the Huffington Post for eight figures down the road. Whatever he does, Cyrus says he won't risk going back to his old ways. Even if he's frustrated with Facebook. His business is completely dependent on it, and he worries that if he crosses the line, Facebook could ban his page altogether. And that's it for this

week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening, listeners. Is there a way you'd like to get your political news on Facebook? I'm always interested to know how you're interacting with the company. You can send us a message to Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or find me on Twitter. I'm at Sarah Fryer and I'm at aki Ito seven. If you enjoy listening to Decrypted, please recommend us to your friends, and if you haven't already, take a moment to rate and

review our show that helps us find new listeners. This episode was produced by Pia Gadkari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Henderson. We'll see you next week, yeah,