The Denver Guardian looked enough like a real news site to convince legions of Facebookers that its fake news about Hillary Clinton was worth sharing. The anonymous creator reused an old handle in an early posting there, though, allowing NPR to track him down to the LA suburbs.
Jestin Coler, 40, weasels at first, claiming it’s all an attempt to “highlight the extremism” and show “how easily fake news spreads.” But he’s soon boasting of a business operation that brings in five figures a month from ads.
Coler’s company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won’t say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.
At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the Denver Guardian that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.
“The people wanted to hear this,” he says. “So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then … our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.”
As with other fake news hucksters, Coler says he also targeted liberals and lefties too, but found that they didn’t fall for it the way others do. He is a registered Democrat. Now the election’s over and Google and Facebook are done with fake news, he’s thinking of getting out of the business—but insists that there are now so many ad tech options that alternative revenue sources are easily found.