Macedonia’s fake news factory
“Made in Tito’s Veles” is the trademark you may find if you turn over a dainty porcelain dish in any ex-Yugoslav country. Emblazoned alongside the initials of Yugoslavia’s chief economic planner, this was a trademark that proudly belonged to the golden era of Yugoslavia’s rapid industrialisation. It was a hallmark of reputable, tangible goods, the genuine article. Now known simply as Veles, the city that was once an industrial hub in the heart of the Republic of Macedonia recently became infamous for manufacturing a very different and pernicious product for export: the "fake news" stories being peddled by some of its digitally literate teenage population.
While older residents nostalgically recount the days when they were proud to see Ivanka (Mrs Tito) wearing silk spun in their factories, their tech-savvy grandchildren achieved a sudden notoriety last autumn, having capitalised on the lucrative media storm surrounding Donald Trump. In turn, the brief flurry of media coverage on unrepentant “adolescent kingpins” assaulting Western politics with their burgeoning empires of misinformation propagated its own distorted representations of an unfamiliar city and its inhabitants. By spotlighting the experience of disenchanted teenage boys, the media cast the whole city in the unflattering light of conventional eastern European stereotypes. Veles became a quintessentially bleak, impoverished vacuum out on the “Balkan hinterlands”, begetting amoral profiteering. Such images ignore the multifaceted reality and belong to a long tradition of Westerners seeking out what historian Larry Wolff called the “half-barbarian” at the “unpolished extremity” of the continent.