The difference? Tamara was rewriting fabricated or misleading articles for two major copycat websites based in North Macedonia targeting US readers. Her job was to churn out semi-plagiarised copies of articles originally published on US extreme right-wing publications, so that her boss could serve them back to unsuspecting Americans thousands of miles away.

I spoke with Tamara in late 2018 in a café in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia. Over the course of three days, she told me in detail about a job she had done for nine months. While her perspective can only ever be that of a single employee, her story reveals the reality of what it was like to work inside these sites.

Tamara wishes to remain anonymous, so to protect her identity, her name and those of the individuals she worked with have been changed. This article also contains some strong language.

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One day in April 2017, Tamara received a phone call from a friend. “I know you are doing nothing, here is a way to do something and make money and still not leave the house,” her friend had said. “You are good in politics and you are good at your English, so would you like to work on news sites?”

“I said ‘Yeah, why not’,” Tamara recalls.

The next step was a video call with “Marco”, a young man with an awkward manner and a job offer.