this is "nightline." >> tonight, faking news. political lies spread on social media by unsuspecting users. did it change the course of the election? meet the unlikely teenagers pumping out fake headlines from half a world away. for real ad revenue. >> the past three months i made my parents' whole year salary. >> who they say they're really looking for. found alive. a mother reported abducted while jogging. her husband and police searching for weeks. >> i'm coming, honey, i'm trying, doing everything i can. >> emerging on the side of a highway. >> she's chained with a quarter-inch heavy chain and hose clamps on her wrists. >> new questions about her mysterious disappearance. a hunt for suspects. but what was their motive?

and better than beyonce? ♪ okay ladies now let's get in formation ♪ >> the surprising instagram account ranked in "rolling stone's" top five. even lining up in formation ahead of queen bey. wait till you see the pictures. first the "nightline 5." that cough doesn't sound so good. >> i think you sound great, move over. >> ease, booger man. take mucinex p.m. mucinex will take care of your cough. >> i'll text you in four hours when your cough returns. >> one pill lasts 12 hours, so. >> looks like i'm good all night. >> david, please, listen! still not coughing? not fair, you guys. waffles are my favorite! >> some cough medicines only last four hours. one mucinex lasts 12 hours. start the relief, ditch the misery, let's end this. >> number one in just 60 seconds.

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good evening. thanks for joining us. tonight we take you to surprising sources of fake news stories which spread faster than real ones during the month leading up to the election. the maxim says, a lie has no legs. but on social media, a lie can often have wings. with the help of users eager to share articles confirming their political views. so just how damaging are these salacious stories and what's behind them? we track down the truth behind the lies. what was your reaction when you woke up and you saw bucket of losers trending? >> i freaked out. >> reporter: it would have been the scoop of a lifetime. a secret transcript of a hillary clinton speech made inside a goldman sachs board room. >> she called sanders voters or whatever a bucket of losers, a play on the basket of deplorables. >> reporter: the story went viral, got picked up on fox news. >> bucket of losers she refers to.

>> she called sanders supporters a bucket of losers. >> the bucket of losers document, it's weird-looking, it's really strange-looking. >> reporter: strange-looking because the whole thing was totally made up. by this man. marco chicon. >> my hands were shaking. like, this is ridiculous. i was thinking that it had gone way too far. >> that was apparently a doctored quote and not real. we apologize for that error. >> reporter: his site, realtruenews.org, another example of fake news making real news headlines. in one of the most contentious elections in modern history, sensationalized and at times flat-out fake news amplifying partisan rancor across the country. >> pope francis shocks the world, endorses donald trump for president! fake. fbi agents suspected in hillary's e-mail leak found dead from apparent murder/suicide from "the denver guardian."

there is no such thing as "the denver guardian." established media brands are built on accuracy. rogue websites, some masquera masquerading as legitimate, are reporting misinformation. and it's spreading like wildfire online. president obama urged common sense. >> if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems. >> reporter: buzzfeed's craig silverman was one of the first to recognize those problems and has been tracking fake news on the internet for years. >> when you track the growth of these websites when did it go big? >> this year. 2016, incomparable to any other years. one of the big factors you can't ignore is donald trump. he generated a huge amount of online excitement. a lot of engagement on facebook. >> reporter: buzzfeed uncovered an unlikely breeding ground for some of the fake news sites. >> more than 100 websites in one small town in central macedonia. >> reporter: that's right, macedonia. veles, a tiny, economically

depressed city of 45,000, the rust belt of the former yugoslavia republic. >> this is a town that used to have an industrial economy, that has gone away. there's a lot of young people there. it's a way for them to earn some extra money, also a way for them to find something to do. >> reporter: we decided to go to macedonia to see for ourselves. some of the websites' creators are speaking out in shadow for the first time on television. >> people found politics is a great field by accident. >> i have like 7.5 million views on one of my articles. >> there is no protection from news, like they'll find a way to spread. >> reporter: most are not political, their only allegiance is to making money. each click of an ad on their site means cash in their pocket. >> basically the past three months i made my parent's whole life salary. >> reporter: at first they blogged about cars, liberal politics. they say none of it got traction online.

until they struck internet gold. >> when you write about trump, the whole people are trying to read something that hillary make like some bad things, like e-mail scandal, wikileaks. you start writing and people start opening the posts and read about it. start resharing. >> people from the states are watching your website, clicking on the banners, and you're making the money. it was like overnight. >> is it overstating it to say all this fake news and the echo chamber that supported it had an impact on the election? >> i think it's impossible to know what the impact is of this stuff. but there's no question that when, for example, we looked at the top 20 fake news stories about the election and compared them to the top 20 election stories from 19 major media outlets, the fake news ones got more engagement on facebook. >> reporter: two days after trump's victory, facebook founder mark zuckerberg dismissed the notion that the social network had an impact.

>> the idea that fake news influenced the election in any way i think is a pretty crazy idea. >> reporter: but a recent pew poll found 62% of american adults get news on social media, with facebook leading the pack by far. nearly two-thirds of its users getting news from the site. it's a fact these young entrepreneurs were banking on. >> see how many people are opening the posts, like six people, three people in a minute. facebook, social traffic, like 90% of the traffic is from facebook. >> facebook drives the traffic that helps them make money. >> reporter: the guys in macedonia are quick to argue that their sites are not fake news. >> first, i don't agree that the sites are fake. maybe some of them have fake stories. but not a lot. >> reporter: but some go further. >> you only copy-paste for

mainstream media? >> yeah, but i'm changing everything in sight. >> you need to have a good headline for your story to be successful. >> a headline that you made yourself? >> yeah. >> can you show us a headline? >> boom, rush reveals michelle's perverted past after she dumps on trump. this is the headline. >> what was the original headline? >> rush reveals michelle's past. >> reporter: but those sites they're lifting from, not exactly pulitzer prize-winning. >> this is the site we take the most posts, followers. >> western journalism? >> yes. conservative tribute, this is the federal paper. >> it's really easy to make something up. the amount of effort, actually, to create something that gets a huge amount of attention on facebook and can earn thousands and thousands of dollars, is minimal. >> reporter: but after scoffing at the notion that fake news on facebook had an impact, zuckerberg now seems to recognize there might be a problem, writing, the bottom line is we take misinformation seriously, we take this

responsibility seriously. we've made significant progress but there is more work to be done. >> facebook is the platform where this stuff is taking off and going viral. and if facebook simply walks away and washes its hands of the whole thing, it's only going to get worse. >> reporter: but the biggest game changer could lie in eliminating the profit motive. >> basically, i have my bank account connected to my google adsense account. and the payments are sent to my bank account. so in a way we are working for google. >> one of the guys we talked to said google would take 70%, he'd get 30%. >> google is making money off fake news because google has a huge ad network called adsense, you can put adsense ads on any website. google is the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to online advertising. >> reporter: in a statement to abc news, google telling us as of early last week, they now prohibit google ads from being placed on misrepresentative content, adding, moving forward we will restrict ad serving on pages

that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information." while many of those sites were a sweet spot for cash, marco chicon says for him it was never about money. >> the number of hits in terms of advertising, i may have had $200 on the site. >> what were you thinking when you posted some of these articles? >> the only way i could think of to have conversation with these people was to say, if you got a piece of crazy fake news, i got one too. and it's even crazier, it's absurd. >> reporter: absurd pieces. like dr. ben carson's call for a grain reserve under the washington monument. or obama ordering isis to take out trump. all, of course, false. why put what could potentially be misconstrued as true out there? because lot of people would say you poisoned the well. >> they might say that. first off, this is a parody of fake news. there's real news, abc.co that looks like abc, designed to look real. nothing on real true news was designed to look real. >> yet people ate it up as if it were true.

>> this is a site meant to fool people to look like abc news. it's run by a guy in arizona named paul horner, who considers himself i think a hoax artist. the crazy thing about this particular site is one of donald trump's kids and his campaign manager, kellyanne conway, both shared at least one story from this fake site during the campaign. >> reporter: he showed me some of his stories online. >> this is a made-up conversation. it's meant to be funny. the byline here is "max insider." >> reporter: separating fact from fiction is not easy when mistrust of mainstream media is at an all-time high. >> when the president-elect will say the only reason hillary clinton has won the popular vote is because of millions voting illegally, which is completely not true, i think that gives license to folks to be loose with the truth and for people to make things up. >> reporter: when our social media feed, designed to mirror our own opinions, only confirming our biases. so when you give a customer what they want? >> they end up drowning in exactly what they want. to the exclusion of anything else.

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it was a baffling missing persons case. a devoted mother of two supermom out for a jog only to vanish. police searches yielding no results for weeks, till finally on thanksgiving day she is found. but the investigation is far from over as the mystery only deepens. here's abc's kayna whitworth. >> reporter: tonight in northern california the mystery continues

to swirl around sherri papini, wife and mother of two found thursday morning after missing for more than three weeks. >> chp is advised she is heavily battered and it is a confirmed kidnapping. >> the hunt still on for the captors. the 34-year-old woman describing two hispanic women, telling authorities they were armed with a handgun and driving a dark-colored suv. >> she's chained with a quarter-inch heavy chain and hose clamps on her wrist. >> she could have been assaulted, hit by her abductors. >> reporter: the shasta county sheriff's office is leading the investigation and delving into her past. >> do you believe mrs. papini's story? >> absolutely. >> reporter: tonight we're learning authorities will interview her again to see if she can offer any more clues to help them close the case. >> we do want her to feel at peace and being able to provide us with additional information. >> the whole idea is to keep her

as less traumatized and as comfortable as possible. because this is not an interrogation. this is really sort of a therapeutic interview to get to a lot of details that could potentially help them solve this case. >> reporter: it was dark just like this when sherri papini told authorities her captors dropped her off there behind me, 150 miles from her home on thanksgiving day. authorities say she was bound with restraints but was able to flag down a passing driver. other drivers were calling 911. >> i saw a woman come out of nowhere. frantically waving what looked like a shirt up and down. >> reporter: alison sutton was driving down this dark yolo county road when she says she passed papini and called 911. >> she pretty much just came out of nowhere. it startled me. but i figured, you know, if somebody was desperate enough for help that they were willing to be so close to traffic that they might get hit, that they really needed help. >> reporter: at the time, sutton didn't know who the woman was.

>> i do feel like i got to be a witness to a small miracle. >> reporter: papini was treated and released from a local hospital and reunited with husband keith. it's unknown if she's seen her children yet. authorities say when they first interviewed her, papini was terrified and offered few details about her captors. >> two women apparently dropped her off. but it's unclear what their role might be. >> reporter: papini, described by her family as supermom, vanished november 2nd after going out for a run. her husband keith called 911 when he came home from work to an empty house. >> i'm coming, honey. i'm trying. i'm doing everything i can. and i love you. >> reporter: pleading for his wife's safe return. >> bring her home. bring her home. just bring her home. >> reporter: keith instantly began his desperate search using

the find my iphone app. he located sherri's cell phone on the side of the road. strands of her hair tangled in her earbuds. keith passing a polygraph test, ruling him out early as a suspect. >> it wasn't a feeling like of relief. i just want my wife back. >> reporter: authorities examining all angles including if papini had left on her own, some asking could this be playing out like a scene from the movie "gone girl"? >> to fake a convincing murder you have to have discipline. >> reporter: her family offered a $50,000 reward for any information. investigators are analyzing papini's restraints and clothing for dna evidence and sifting through surveillance data including camera footage and cell phone records. the shasta county sheriff's office is looking into papini's past, her former marriage and divorce, and her online activity. >> have you spoken with her ex-husband? >> i have not. but my investigators have. >> what of this they learned

from him? >> since it's an ongoing investigating, i can't share that information. >> reporter: this alleged abduction comes after two prominent cases of women who were found dead this summer while out running alone. 27-year-old vanessa marcot in princeton, massachusetts. a week prior, karina vetrano of queens, new york. >> if you're a woman, just don't go run alone. you need to run in pairs or more than two. it can all be women but run in a group. >> reporter: after three weeks missing, it's unknown when papini will get back to her normal life. >> it takes a long time, typically, for people who have been traumatized to this extent, and it's not going to happen overnight. >> reporter: for "nightline," i'm kayna whitworth in redding, california. next, why the tsa instagram account ranked higher than beyonce's. the answer may take your shoes off.

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lift up your head and keep moving or let the paranoia haunt you? everybody lack confidence, everybody lack confidence i keep my fee-fi-fo-fum i keep my heart undone the strong in me, i still smile.

finally tonight, the tsa may not be so popular at the airport. but on instagram?

that's another story. ♪ ♪ >> beyonce may have more than 89 million instagram followers. but according to "rolling stone" magazine there's a hot new instagram that already has users falling into formation. tsa ranked number four on "rolling stone's" list of 100 best instagram accounts between queen bey and rihanna. tsa advising passengers with witty posts on what you can and cannot bring on board. from a knife tucked in an enchilada, to a set of spears made famous by the teenage mutant ninja turtles, tsa making it clear even action figure weapons won't fly. jimmy kimmel reminding us -- >> if you have a battery, leave it at home with your mother. >> reporter: tsa inviting travelers to ask if their sometimes unusual items are safe for travel. one user asking what we're all

wondering. can we carry on that can of gefilte fish? a serious agency finding a little humor goes a long way. especially when you're waiting in endless lines. of course, some things are worth the wait. thanks for watching abc news. as always, we're online at abcnews.com and our "nightline" facebook page. good night, america.