WHO'S WHO IN THE DISSIDENT RIGHT: ZERO HEDGE

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Fake Tyler Durden avatar

by Colin Liddell

Read other entries like this in  Who's Who in the Dissident Right, an ever-expanding biographical guide to the colorful characters of the Right Wing

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Zero Hedge tries to paint itself as an "edgy" economics website, but the truth is a lot simpler than that. It is, and always has been, nothing but an industrious, low-level Russian disinfo site, crafting stories and leaking narratives into the wider "dissident sphere" that promote Kremlin interests. 

In 2022 U.S. intelligence officials said that the site was pushing articles created by Moscow-controlled media. Although that did not prove anything besides editorial preferences, the probability of Zero Hedge being a willing tool of the Kremlin is extremely high. In fact, all other explanations fail to adequately account for all the meta-data that we now have on the site, its activities, and the people associated with it.

Firstly, there is its rather odd origin story. The site was founded in 2009 by Daniel Ivandjiiski, a then 31-year-old Bulgarian from a high-ranking Communist background. Ivandjiiski is the son of Krassimir Ivandjiiski, a former Soviet-era Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Trade official who, since 1994, has been the publisher and editor-in-chief of the "far-right" Bulgarian political news website, Strogo Sekretno.

Then there is the rather odd  Zero Hedge business model. Despite its rather dull content and style, the site is way more popular than you would expect. This suggests that its "popularity" is not organic, but is artificially boosted in some way. In 2022 it had 1.2 million Twitter followers, and now, with the more "sympathetic" Elon Musk in charge of Twitter, it has 1.6 million followers. However, its tweets get much lower engagement than this number of followers would indicate, a typical indicator of bot boosting.

Disinfosphere

Also, the site claims it makes its money just from advertising. This seems highly unlikely, as there are few ads on the site, and it is unlikely that anyone is actually clicking on these.

But is there anything more than this kind of circumstantial evidence? Yes, there is. Back in 2016 there was an interesting break in the ranks at Zero Hedge, which revealed their blatant Putinist agenda.

One of the writers using the "Tyler Durden" pen name, Colin Lokey, then 32 years old, went public, revealing that in addition to him and Ivandjiiski,  Tim Backshall a 45-year-old credit derivatives strategist, was also "Tyler Durden".

Lokey also released transcripts from Zero Hedge internal chat sessions and gave an interview to Bloomberg. From this it is clear that Zero Hedge exists solely to mix in Putinist propaganda with actual news, a well-known Kremlin technique. 

Lokey, who said he wrote much of the site’s political content, claimed there was pressure to frame issues in a way he felt was disingenuous. “I tried to inject as much truth as I could into my posts, but there’s no room for it. “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft,” Lokey wrote, describing his take on the website's politics.

But back to the finance, it is hard to believe that this formula could generate the rewards enjoyed by the staff without additional funding from a hidden hand. The Bloomberg story also revealed that Ivandjiiski was living in a multimillion-dollar "castle" in New Jersey, Backshall in a plush San Francisco suburb, while Lokey reported earnings of more than $100,000 per year before his break with Zero Hedge. 

Also, check out this "highly supportive" RT report on Zero Hedge from 2019, when it was kicked off Facebook. Very revealing in all sorts of unintentional ways!

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).