There are several, sometimes dozens, of portals linked to Facebook pages that are usually edited and perhaps even supervised by just one person or a small group of people.
These websites that claim to be media, hibrid.info considers as dubious media. This is because they do not meet any single criterion that would prove their media activity, such as the following columns:
- About us (information about the medium),
- Contact,
- Print,
- Registering them as a business or NGO,
- Authors of articles, etc.
Such websites continue to be active in the digital space. When we talk about the Albanian-speaking audience, such ones are very active and have a significant audience, based on the number of likes and followers of the pages on social media, especially on Facebook, knowing that the latter has the widest use in Kosovo and Albanian-speaking areas.
In some cases, the function of these dubious sites, which claim to be media, is also called "Portal Farms" or in general terminology they are also known as "Content Farms".
Using Facebook for distribution
Every such portal that hibrid.info has analyzed so far is linked to at least one Facebook page. In the geographical area where we live, Facebook is still the most popular social network and has grown into a dominant platform for promoting everything from products and brands to media and their information. And this is the key factor for the phenomenon we call “portal farms”.
Their sole purpose seems to be to achieve the highest possible number of visits/clicks that bring profit, which will be discussed further in the text. The content of such pages is promoted on Facebook, mainly in groups and pages that are not clearly connected to the portal itself and are presented as media, humorous, entertainment pages, etc. Each such page on Facebook usually serves to promote several portals and vice versa – all these portals usually share their content on more than one Facebook page. The entire network of portals and pages connected in this way, owned by one person or the same group of people, constitutes a “portal farm”.
Pages like these – both on Facebook and on the web – often pass “from hand to hand”, that is, they are bought and sold through advertisements or personal contacts. In some of these advertisements, it is claimed that the profits generated by such “developed businesses” can reach several thousand euros per month. The “development” of the portal is measured by the number of visits, and they mostly depend on the aspect of visibility on Facebook. None of this, of course, is reported as a source of income, so the business is even more profitable, since there are no taxes.
Suspicious websites serve as content creators, while they are promoted by sharing on Facebook pages.
It happens that most of these Facebook pages share almost identical content throughout the day, which suggests that all of this could be managed by one person or group of people.
These dubious portals often change their domain (URL address), but the content remains the same as the previous ones and they continue to distribute their content on the same Facebook pages.
Hibrid.info in 2020 had created a special section for these suspicious portals and suspicious Facebook pages that claim to be media (see list). here).
The domains of these portals as another characteristic
Most of these dubious portals that create and distribute content in the Albanian language, which can be considered part of farm networks, have unusual domains.
The vast majority of them have combined names such as (we are mentioning two examples as an illustration) "mir.active24live.com" or "banglacontent24.com".
But there are also those who have domains in the Albanian language.
According to research conducted through the database that serves to identify and origin domains, hibrid.info has seen that a large portion of them are domains registered in Scandinavian or Nordic countries, with a large percentage from Iceland, specifically the capital Reykjavik.
Article from hibrid.info