She says she struck out on her own over dissatisfaction with the way the company was being run. Hanson and Gouldman did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, or to a detailed list of allegations. Hanson started the Addicting Info website in Long before Facebook was the dominant way to drive traffic to news websites, Hanson was staking out his turf there.
In , Hanson wrote that he was the administrator of more than 50 Facebook pages. At issue was an image allegedly taken from a Facebook page and recirculated by the Addicting Info and Being Liberal pages.
Last year, as traffic and revenue grew for liberal and conservative sites alike, tensions began to boil over. Hanson and Gouldman figure prominently in three lawsuits filed in that center around page ownership, finances, and an alleged improper disclosure of company secrets.
Taken together, the filings show how a small number of big players control many of the dominant pages and sites in liberal hyperpartisan news, writers are often paid in the form of ad commissions from the content they create, and the top sites generate at least tens of thousands of dollars per month in revenue.
Addicting Info currently has over 1. Today, Addicting Info and Occupy Democrats are competitors fighting for the same liberal audience. They allege that the Occupy site was initially unsuccessful, so the men formed a content sharing agreement that saw Addicting Info help promote Occupy Democrats content on its Facebook page.
The Rivero brothers did not respond to detailed requests for comment sent to them and their lawyers. Content sharing agreements are common for both liberal and conservative pages. Sharing content from like-minded sites helps ensure that owners always have fresh content to promote, and it helps grow their audience by bringing new people to their site from other pages. In their filing with the court, the Rivero brothers denied this.
Hanson and Gouldman then allege that at the beginning of the Rivero brothers cut their partners from Addicting Info out of Occupy Democrats operations. Essentially, the Addicting Info owners allege that the Riveros snatched away the Occupy Democrats page and revenue after Addicting Info helped grow it. In the end, the case was resolved in mediation earlier this year and was officially dismissed March 1.
That information eventually made its way into a article on the right-wing website GotNews. In court documents, Farley argued that she was in a depressed state when she disclosed the information, and in Facebook conversations entered into evidence she pleaded for understanding. After this article was published, Farley emailed BuzzFeed News to say she had nothing to do with outing Gouldman, saying it was the work of a former employee.
Farley filed a counterclaim against Hanson and Gouldman regarding her articles on the site, saying they are copyrightable material and asking for them to be removed.
The suit is ongoing; meanwhile, Farley launched and now runs her own liberal site, GOPocalypse. With Trump in power, liberal publishers have an enemy to go after every day who gets their audience riled up.
Her site went from a hobby to a full-time job. But the success is causing friction between more established left-leaning sites and the new breed of Facebook-focused hyperpartisan sites that have emerged in recent years. A March article from the progressive website AlterNet leveled similar accusations of plagiarism and unethical behavior at operations such as Occupy Democrats and Addicting Info.
Sky Palma runs a liberal website called DeadState and says the gold rush for liberal sites is seducing owners into writing misleading articles and headlines. In a Facebook thread, he called out liberal website Opposition Report for twisting the words of controversial right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.
Conservative sites and pages saw a similar scenario play out last year, according to one publisher. Cyrus Massoumi runs the Mr. Conservative website and its Facebook page, which has more than 2. In an interview with BuzzFeed News earlier this year, he spoke of how new entrants in conservative hyperpartisan news published false or misleading content — and were rewarded for it with growth and engagement on Facebook.
He said the split between left and right is about equal, as many readers flock to his page to see what outlandish thing people might believe. The traffic can be high, with more than 1 million views in a month, he said.
The best he ever saw for a single post was when he published a fake story that called Florida for Trump on Election Day — at 3 p. The post telegraphed the extreme improbability of such a pronouncement in a presidential election, but still garnered , clicks, Blair said. He added that awareness of fake news has kept any post from blowing up like that since. Blair likened his offerings to the audiences that believe the "left-wing lies" on other sites. Michelle Amazeen, a Boston University mass communications professor, has been working on research that shows fake news sites can influence the types of stories that partisan news media covered.
Readers, too, are affected by a psychological phenomenon called the illusory truth effect, she said. Familiarity encourages belief. Reliable information about Blair, or Busta Troll, or whatever name he may be using, is fragmented at best.
There were no references to anyone by that name in any government records database we consulted. There is a Twitter account in limbo , but Wilekenmeyer did not, as far as we could tell, exist in real life. When we found Blair on Facebook, we cross-referenced him on criminal databases and looked for him in property records.
And even when he started talking to us online, we were wary enough to take his story with a grain of salt — because you can never be too sure about a troll. Blair told us the Wilekenmeyer account belonged to him. Blair uses his own characters to aid in his elaborate storylines, discrediting the very people he has made up. Lyman also was a fake name, devised during an elaborate scheme to reveal the identity of Busta Troll, an online persona known for "goating" conservative Facebook pages.
As Busta Troll, Blair would gain the trust of the Facebook page administrators, earn his own administrator privileges, then post scads of photos of goats , leading the victims to ultimately shut down the page. This spawned an entire group of liberal trolls on Facebook that Blair called "the goat herd.
Except not only was Lyman a faux name and story , Kopper was entirely made up, too, the invention of another group of liberal bloggers that Blair would not identify.
Busta Troll posted about it on his own page , admitting the yarn was faked. The subterfuge also was the subject of a YouTube video:. This video appeared on YouTube after an elaborate scheme to unmask Busta Troll as Christopher Lyman, which was another pseudonym. Busta Troll was actually a name Blair said he started using in , while writing real posts for Liberaland.
He used it on AlanColmes. The Nugent saga and why he did it is chronicled on that site. He used the name Christopher Blair at AddictingInfo.
He also used the name Frank Wilekenmeyer, he said. A job description of "Paid Liberal Troll. He told PolitiFact that he actually is a volunteer Little League umpire at a small town in Maine, echoing a detail of his Lyman alias. Wired , " Inside the Macedonian fake-news complex ," Feb. PunditFact, " Reports about Ted Nugent dying or not on hunting trip is convoluted hoax ," May 1, PunditFact, " Fake news posts wrongly say U.
Twitter, Ezekiel Wilekenmeyer profile , accessed May 10, Twitter, Busta Troll profile , accessed May 12, The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter. Stand up for the facts!
More Info. I would like to contribute. One Time Monthly Yearly. If you're fooled by fake news, this man probably wrote it. By Joshua Gillin May 31, Read About Our Process. Sebastian Gorka stated on November 1, an appearance on 'Hannity':. Bloggers stated on October 6, Internet posts:. Bloggers stated on October 29, Internet posts:.
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