Fake News Fairytale
On the trail of the Macedonian teenagers who may have swung Trump's election.
One of my favourite Tweets came during Mark Zuckerberg’s Congress testimony in 2018.
Sharing a photo of a haunted looking Zuck perhaps wondering how on earth it came to this, Zach Bornstein wrote, “That face when you just wanted a faster way to rank girls by looks and ended up installing a fascist government in the most powerful country on earth.”
The Tweet – and many like it – played on the tragicomedy of the Big Tech era, which is that so much of what happened was never planned or foreseen. Move fast and break things is, it turns out, a recipe for fucking disaster.
These unintended consequences are deftly explored in Kate Stonehill’s Fake News Fairytale (2018). Many of us heard about the teenagers in a small Macedonian town cranking out nonsense stories that enflamed the 2016 Presidential election.
But Kate and her team actually traveled to Veles (population 45,000), to interview some of those responsible.
It’s a cracking story, made all the more interesting by Kate’s inventive and stylistic approach. There are masks, grainy VHS footage, a ghostwritten voiceover and fantastic score that leans into the fairytale theme (think Provokiev’s Peter and the Wolf).
I went into this film thinking I knew what it was going to be, and came away delightfully discombobulated.
I spoke with Kate over Zoom. You can see more of her work on her website, and her feature doc, Phantom Parrot, is on the festival circuit now.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I guess I was always interested in fake news, and it was a big topic at the time. I was interested not just on a political level, but fake news in terms of what it tells us about stories, and stories that captivate us.
Then I read an article in Wired magazine about these teenagers in Macedonia who were writing fake news.
It was fascinating – the geopolitics of it really interested me. Then I spoke to a friend, a sound designer, who's Macedonian, and I asked is this really happening? It seemed almost too good to be true.
And he said yes – he knew people, friends of friends, who were doing it. So we made the decision to go and try and make a film about it.
What were the biggest challenges?
People were very, very skeptical of any visual media about this story. There had been little news pieces, and people felt that they had a moralistic tone to them, you know – do you realise what you're doing?
I watched a couple of those, and felt that the tone was really off, because these people weren't politically motivated. They were part of this bigger machine.
I knew that access would be really tricky, but it was as hard, if not harder than I thought when I got there. People really didn't want to speak on camera.
I brought the masks because I thought there could be something interesting in using them to tell the story. I didn't have the option of the traditional doc, but that really pushed me into a creative place.
I think because I come from documentary, it took me a while to realise that a scripted voiceover had to lead the structure. It became clear that we needed to stick quite closely to this very disciplined arc.
So the edit became challenging, because I had a lot of ideas that we'd experimented with on the shoot.
We ended up having to work out which of those we were going to throw out – how was this scripted voiceover going to interact with the observational material that I'd shot.
A lot of what you see in the film, we really figured that out in the edit.
Is there anything now you would do differently?
Oh yeah. I cringe a little bit when I watch the graphics. Some of them are actual screen recordings that that I did on my laptop.
I like that aesthetic of a low-fi screen recording, but I think there are ways that we could have elevated some of those moments.
I remember feeling very inexperienced in that particular area, of bringing graphics into an edit and then understanding how they might interface with the story.
The other thing, which is a bit funny, is that we actually shot some of it on VHS. Actual VHS, which was a huge mistake.
I had this whole thing with the DOP about being authentic, but going into the grade, there’s absolutely nothing you can do with that footage.
What are you most proud of?
I think I took a big risk in the approach to the film. I wasn't following any particular inspiration – I hadn't seen anything like it, and I just followed my instincts.
Sometimes I think I should have been more disciplined, but actually I'm not sure about that, because that's where the creativity comes from.
So I feel proud of the fact that the film took a really unusual approach to quite a conventional subject, with very limited access.
And we pulled it off! I had days in the edit where I just thought, this isn't going to fucking work. It's not even pretending to work. And it does work in the end, but it was a bit sink or swim.
Maybe there was something about that moment in time, when I didn't know as much. It's a good reminder not to lose that mindset of just trying things.
How did this film change you?
It was well-received in a number of ways and I got a lot of confidence from that.
It made me feel, ok, I tried something that was a bit out there and it resonated with people. And it still resonates with people now.
My feature doc is completely different, but it also had a lot of limitations around access. I think I felt more confident going into a story where I knew those limitations existed.
Making this film made me reflect a lot on the role of the tech companies. I think a lot of that stayed with me, definitely.
I was listening to a podcast the other day about Ai and just how terrifying it could be for misinformation.
People talk about bad actors with Ai, but this film shows we don't even need bad actors in order for us to live in a terrifying space from a misinformation perspective.
The system is set up for profit from clicks and virality. It's not set up necessarily for truth.
To be honest, I think that's where the framing as a fairytale came from. Fairytales have a lesson – you're supposed to learn. And so it's like, have we learned our lesson?
Thanks so much to Kate, and to you for reading. This newsletter is likely going to become fortnightly over the coming weeks as summer blooms and people get harder to pin down for interviews. Don’t miss us too much…