The Daily - The Business of Internet Outrage

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

At the height of its reach, the right-wing website Mad World News was getting millions of views. We talked to its founders about how they hit upon the formula that made it so successful — and why it suddenly stopped working. Guest Host: Kevin Roose, who writes about technology for The New York Times, reported this story for “The Daily.” For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

So, did you notice as you were writing stories, any types of stories that did particularly well? Yeah, highly opinionated stories. I would love to write nothing but good news all day, but I think a lot of people aren't really honest about what they like and what they don't like. They want to hear the gossip, the bad news. It does seem like we like division. We like it. We thrive on it, especially on social media. From The New York Times, I'm Kevin Roos. And today, a story I've been working on for The Daily for the past few months that, in the last week, has taken on new meaning. It's Wednesday, October 31st.

You want to just go ahead and start us off in August, when all this got started? Okay. So, a few months ago, I decided I wanted to cover social media in the midterms. And I wanted to focus in particular on Facebook, which is the biggest and kind of most influential platform. And so one of the first things I did is I built myself a little dashboard. And how it works is it lets you kind of like zoom out on the entire internet. Basically a giant surveillance machine for all of Facebook. Hey everyone, we are live from my backyard. And you can kind of look at what is popular on any given topic on any given day.

And we have to vote! This dashboard that I created for myself was about politics. Last night was a surprise. We always thought it was possible. And about the midterm specifically. The left is energized. Tens of millions of dollars are flooding into Texas. And I check this a couple times a day

just to kind of see who's getting the most attention on Facebook. Why do you want to know about that? I want to... On one level, I'm just sort of fascinated, but it's important to me to know what is being shared and talked about on the world's largest communication platform. They keep talking about this blue wave. Their blue wave is really sputtering pretty badly. The red wave is happening. And most days, if you just look at what's the most popular stuff happening on political Facebook, it's the usual suspects, right?

Tonight, warning flags are going up in Texas where Senator Ted Cruz is fighting to hold on to his seat. It's Fox News. It's CNN. The problem for Democrats is that really all they have in 2018 is how much they hate President Trump. And it's Huffington Post. It's Breitbart. All they have in 2018 is how much they hate President Trump. And it's Huffington Post, it's Breitbart. But over and over again, I kept seeing one website that I had never heard of before, and it was doing incredibly well.

Yeah, so I'm on their page. Trump hating CNN doesn't want damning photos shared, so let's spread it everywhere. Their stuff was going viral all the time. Lots of their posts were getting thousands of comments and likes and shares. Lindsey Graham utterly humiliates Liz Warren. And the tone of the thing was kind of a right-wing tabloid. Florida socialist wants Medicare for all. There's just one secret he's not revealing. Almost like a hybrid of TMZ and Breitbart. The Clinton body count. You won't believe these numbers. With a little Infowars mixed in, you have some conspiracy theories, some racially insensitive language, some anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim stuff. Motorists horrified when they see what Muslim driver has strapped to the back of his van.

And it was called Mad World News. Hi, is Corey there, please? Yes, who's calling? This is Kevin Roos from the New York Times. Hold on, please. May I ask who's calling? This is Kevin Roos from the New York Times. Hold on, please.

So I start trying to figure out who's behind this and immediately run into some walls. Like, I went on their website and went to the About Us section, and there are no names there, no identifying details about who's behind this. I go into some of the articles that they're posting, and some of them seem to be pen names. So I do some research, I figure out a phone number,

and I give them a call. Hello? Hi, Corey. Hi. Hi, my name's Kevin Roos. I'm a reporter with the New York Times. I wanted to just ask you about a Facebook page that I've been looking at,

Mad World News. Are you the owner of that page? Co-owner. Co-owner. Great. And it turns out that, yeah, he and his wife, they are the owners of Mad World News. Is this your primary job?

Do you have a day job or is this just a hobby? I had a day job when I started it, but I don't anymore. And it also turns out that they live pretty close. They're in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, which is about a four-hour drive from New York City. So I ask them if we can come over, and they say, sure. Come on over. So you, Andy Mills. Oh, bunnies for sale. Did you see that?

Bunnies? You and I and your recorder, we headed over to Mercersburg. Fresh tomato stand. Oh, we got a farm stand. It's got kind of rolling hills. It's very bucolic. Sweet corn, peaches, lots of farms. And we pull up to this address.

All right. And it's a big house. All right, let's go. Nice lawn in the front. Got a pool in the back. And we knock on the door. Hi, how are you? Corey?

Yep. Kevin, nice to meet you. And we meet... Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Kevin. Corey and Christy Peppel. We usually wear pajamas, but today we put on pants. They are the owners of Mad World News.

What a beautiful house. Thank you. As big as the house is, we don't use a lot of the rooms. And they start giving us a tour around. That just goes down to the basement.

That's where our master suite is. This is the good living room. It's a really nice house. It looks pretty new. The 12-year-old has the entire upstairs, which is a total of three bedrooms and a loft space. It's got spare rooms

after spare rooms. That's where we usually have dinner. Big multi-car garage. And then we just have the good dining room that rarely gets used. I swore I'd never do that. I swore I'd never do that growing up. What a great space. Eventually. We'll take you to the den where we usually work. That's our HR department in there. never do that. I swear I'd never do that growing up. Well, what a great space. Eventually...

We'll take you to the den where we usually work. That's our HR department in there. They bring us into this room. This is where we work all day. This is the headquarters? Yeah. Yeah. How many hours a day do you think you spend in this room? At least 12. We sit down and... Do you guys want something to drink?

And then... Well, I appreciate you guys taking time. I know you got a busy day, so we'll try to be efficient here. I kind of asked them to start at the beginning. Before Mad World News, I was a machine operator at a book manufacturing plant. Corey was working the night shift at a book manufacturing company. How long did you do that? About 13 years. And Christy was a registered nurse.

I was a nurse. I've worked in labor and delivery. I've worked in the prison system. Corey was not particularly political. Actually, I never voted prior to the 2016 election. And then Christy enters his life. I'm a talker. I like to put my opinion out there.

I'm not real shy because I don't want to get stuck with somebody that doesn't have the same passion and drive and is going to argue with me not doing it. You know, as they start dating and their relationship grows and grows, they both sort of become more political. All of this is happening kind of during the rise of the Tea Party. The Marxist, progressive, whatever you want to call the collectivist philosophy that dominates Washington right now. The reaction to the Obama presidency. Obama! Obama! And it's also a time when a lot of people are getting onto social media for the first time and are spending a lot more time on Facebook, not just sharing pictures of their friends and family, but they're discussing politics.

What were some of the first political posts you can remember making? I remember often going to liberal sites and trying to comment on their pages, and I would promptly get banned. So I thought, well, if I want to get my voice out there, I'm going to have to create my own page. And originally it was called Conservatives Exposing Liberal Lies. It starts off kind of clunky. My first article, it was horrible.

It was like one paragraph and I block quoted an entire Fox News article. He was not a professional writer. I completely plagiarized. He was just kind of going by feel. You know, when you live and learn, oh, well, we shouldn't take the whole, you know, thing. And what did it look like at that time? Mostly it was rewriting other articles and trying to add my input to them. And pretty quickly he figures out that if he just puts ads on his website. You know, the articles I would share, the memes I would post. He'll get paid for every click. I'd work my 12-hour job and then come home and then try to do like two articles on my work days.

And then if I was off, I'd try to do four. So during the day, he would write stories and post them on Facebook. And at night, he would go to the book factory and work his night shift. Yeah, I worked 12-hour shifts from 7 to 7. Eventually, Corey gets curious. I was trying to do like a test run. So he decides to run an experiment. He starts to wonder, like, can this be more than my side hobby? Like I took a week vacation to try to see how much traffic I could generate to see if it

would replace my income. And I was successful at doing that. And he makes more in that one week than he would have made in a month at his old job. So we were really excited, thinking, you know, wow. And he realizes, like, he can quit and do this full time. And it was difficult. I'm not going to lie. When your husband looks at you, new husband, looks at you and says, I want to quit my job. I want to do this thing, and I think I can make money.

It was kind of like, okay, honey. But as it turns out, the timing for starting a right-wing partisan news and opinion site in 2014 could not have been better. Terrorists now control large swaths of Iraq's second largest city. There's the rise of ISIS. Growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African-American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. There's police violence and Black Lives Matter. There's the Hobby Lobby decision. Outside the Supreme Court today, opponents formed up on either side of America's ideological line. Then over a period of months, the page grew and grew and grew until we had like

200,000 followers. The money gets so good. What was really shocking is when he then looks at me and says, I want you to quit your job as a nurse and help me do this. That he convinces Christy to quit her job too. Like, yeah, right. And he's like, nah, quit. So now there are two of them. And we turned into workaholics.

We worked seven days a week. They got better at what topics were reliably popular. Cop stories. If there's something about a cop, write it. Officers try to do their jobs. Thugs use them as punching bags. What kinds of headlines could get people to click? Barack Obama distorts the Bible again.

Is your Facebook use funding abortions? If you can make a good story sound like a bad story, you'll have a viral story. And as they started experimenting with different kinds of posts and different kinds of stories, like not everything worked. It did get to the point, though, where if we criticize police at all, nobody wanted to hear it. You can't be too misleading or people will be angry and just not share it. Did you notice any types of stories that did particularly well? Yeah.

Highly opinionated stories. I think a lot of people aren't really honest about what they like and what they don't like. And they notice that over and over again. They want to hear the gossip, the bad news. The most reliable way to get people to click on a story

is to make them angry. Obama spits in the face of Israel. Watch how Islam takes over the world. I would love to write nothing but good news all day, but that's not what they want. Family shot at for Confederate flag. It does seem like we like division. Look at the movies that we watch. They're dramas, they're thrilling, they're action.

Armed with that knowledge. We like it, we thrive on it, especially on social media. They started kind of turning up the volume on the anger in their posts. Muslim family arrested for keeping white couple as slaves. Especially on posts about race and immigration and Muslim extremism. Black Lives Matter movement called for white genocide. They took it pretty far, and now it's beginning. And the more they dialed up the anger, the more successful they were.

We had a month where we made more in that month than we made in the whole year with our previous employment. That was pretty awesome. We'll be right back. So a year into it, Corey and Christy were doing really well. They'd sort of refined Mad World News into this well-oiled machine. At one point, we had two couples that worked for us. Then it finally got to the point, okay, we're comfortable.

And they were making money hand over fist. I remember having a story that hit, was it 27 million views? And help me understand, like, I don't know how much that translates to in terms of ad revenue. Like, I don't know how much

people pay per view. Do we want to put that on the record? So they wouldn't tell us exactly how much money they made, but they did tell us that a good month on the site would be around 20 million views. They told us they sometimes got paid around $6 in ad revenue for every 1,000 views. You kind of put those numbers together,

you come out with about $120,000 a month. And then, ladies and gentlemen, came the 2016 election. I am officially running for president of the United States. And again, it is very good to be in the business of anger on the internet. It is very good to be in the business of anger on the internet. You can put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.

That's when we really started to focus more on... Expert exposes Hillary's mystery illness. More politics, more politics, more politics. Hillary Clinton delivers giant FU to America. It's just not true. And so please go to... Oh, you didn't delete him? Allow her to respond, please. more politics, more politics, more politics. Hillary Clinton delivers giant FU to America. It's just not true. And so please go to... Oh, you didn't delete him? Allow her to respond, please. Personal emails, not official.

33,000? Please allow her to respond. She didn't talk while you talked. In a lot of ways, the election was sort of tailor-made for an organization like Mad World News. It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

Because you'd be in jail. Secretary Clinton. They kept growing all throughout the election. That was crazy. Even though people online started accusing them of hate speech for some of their posts. We were called hateful. And a few of them even got labeled as fake news by fact checkers like Snopes. They were called as fake news, so that was kind of frustrating.

They just kept growing. People just kept clicking. Then, of course, Donald Trump wins the election. I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton. And, once again,

it is good to be in the business of anger on the internet. This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period. You've got crowd sizes at the inauguration. Trump doubles down on Islam comment and the media is going crazy. Got the travel ban. Deep state White House official backstabs Trump. And were there public figures you noticed generated more anger than others?

Love to hate Hillary. Hillary spits in America's face. They really do love to hate Hillary. Hillary tells disgusting lie about disabled girl. Hillary spits in voters' faces. Maxine Waters. Maxine brags, I threaten Trump supporters all the time. They like to know what Barack's still doing since he tends to be more vocal than other previous

presidents. Obama meets with illegal aliens and calls them Americans just like us. And they start to see their highest months ever. September of 17 was our absolute best. And they're making more money than ever before. And then it's like they took the legs right out from

under us. We came here for the friends. And we got to know the friends of our friends. And right as MetWorld News' business is booming... We found others just like us. And just like that, we felt a little less alone. Facebook, which has been getting a lot of bad press, starts trying to change the basic fabric of their service.

But then something happened. We had to deal with spam, clickbait, fake news, and data misuse. That's going to change. From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy so we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place. Friends. What did that do to your traffic? We went from having the best month we had ever had revenue-wise, 20 million views, to being lucky in the months to come to have 200 active viewers at a time. Facebook kind of starts like tinkering with the dials. This is a graph with our Facebook traffic from January 1st, 2017 until today, which is August 6th, 2018.

And on one level, it appears they accomplished what they set out to do. How would you describe that, Kevin? Well, it looks a little like the stock market in 2008. This sort of sensational, over-the-top, angry post from Mad World News stopped getting as much attention. At our highest point, we had a team of about a dozen. They had to let go of a few writers. Right now we have four contractors. Four contractors and me. And they say that Facebook is sort of not honoring the contract it made with them.

So I'm a little angry. Like we produce stuff that people on Facebook want to see and you show it to them. Now, mind you, I paid Facebook half a million dollars. And the way that they tell the story, there's an actual financial piece of this as well. Because I was told the more you pay, the more fans you get, the more fans you have, the more feeds you go in. And then if you're going to take away what we paid you for, have some integrity, give the money back. So it is true from what we know that the money that publishers have paid to Facebook to reach their audience is not going as far as it used to. Because Facebook now is trying to push people more toward the posts that their

friends and family members put up and trying to show them less of the stuff that's published by professional organizations. So actually now, when I look at that dashboard that I made for political Facebook posts, I can see that these changes have hit Mad World News pretty hard. I mean, most days, they're not in the top 10. They're not even in the top 20. And yet, they're still there in some way. Their DNA is still on the leaderboard because if you look at what's popular, Hollywood's midterm meltdown,

whether it's Fox News or Breitbart, Trump to caravan, go back to your country, or The Daily Caller, white libs have more of a race problem than blacks. Or even some of the most popular left-wing pages, like Occupy Democrats, all Trump cares about is rich people, or the other 98%. Andrew Gillum destroys his Republican opponent with epic takedown. The stuff that's doing really, really well on social media is this kind of hyper-partisan outrage bait that's designed to stir people into a frenzy. In a lot of ways, despite all of Facebook's attempts to turn down the volume on their platform, the politics there seem angrier than ever. Facebook has said that it wants to bring people together, that it wants to

improve the community that exists there. Do you think that's possible? Honest answer? No. Why not? I think when you get people together, there tends to be conflict. I don't think Facebook changed the way people are in any negative or positive way. It just showed how people are. Unpack that a little bit. Like, what did it show people to be? Like, suddenly you think the world is plagued by bad cops, but it's not. It's just now we see all the bad cop stories because

they're on Facebook. But again, is anger such a bad reaction? Like, is it really that? I have trouble comprehending why everybody has this thing, don't make anybody angry, you know? Like, I don't know that it's such a horrible thing to feel a negative emotion. I mean, I guess one other question that is separate from the thing about sort of conflict and division is violence. I mean, we have seen a rise in the number of violent incidents against Muslims, against immigrants. Do you think there is a connection between the kind of anger that people feel on social media and some of this violence in the world? I think part of the problem with some of the growing violence that we're seeing is that we're not always addressing where it's coming from. If Trump says something, everybody's all over it. If somebody on the right does something, we're all over it. If somebody on the right does something, we're all over it.

When Republicans are being shot, when Maxine Waters is calling for violence, nobody wants to address that. When we have videos of Trump supporters getting their hats taken from them and drinks thrown in their face, maybe the solution isn't being like, you know, no, let's quiet everybody down, but letting everybody point out bad behavior on both sides. I would push back just a little bit. Is the tone contributing to a more violent society, do you think? That's a tough one. Is it possible? Yeah. So that was a few months ago. And then... Federal agents are working tonight to get to the bottom of a rash of bomb scares up and down the East Coast. The targets are mainly prominent Democrats as well as CNN. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, and CNN.

Those are some of the president's fiercest political rivals. Earlier today, 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc was charged with five federal counts, including mailing of explosives, threats against former presidents, and assault. Sayoc was very active on social media the days and weeks before his arrest. So after Cesar Sayoc was arrested and named as the suspect in the attempted bombings, Facebook took down his profile. But before it did, I was able to save a copy, and I spent hours going through his old posts, trying to look for patterns or clues about his motive.

And there, among a bunch of other posts that were sensationalistic and hyperbolic, I found several links to stories written by Mad World News. I got a hold of Corey and Christy to tell them what I found, and Corey right away said, quote, no one would be happy to hear that this guy shared their content. And then I asked if they felt any sort of culpability, if they felt at all responsible for contributing to the anger that this man felt. And Christie said, quote, there's got to be some blame going around. All over.

Not just right-wing news. Here's what else you need to know today. President Trump traveled to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Tuesday to pay his respects to the victims of Saturday's shooting. We're not meeting! We're not meeting! The president encountered nearly a thousand protesters outside the synagogue. You shall only be remembered as a son of peace. The president encountered nearly a thousand protesters outside the synagogue who sang Hebrew prayers and held up signs directed at the president that said, words matter, and you are not welcome here until you fully denounce white nationalism. I'm Kevin Roos.

That's it for The Daily.