* which side of the argument creates more fakes than other
Maybe it's almost entirely a propaganda war with a few traces of facts. Maybe it's mostly real, who knows. This is far away for many of us. So without some hard evidence we don't have much reason to believe any of it.
"Someone said something" is not good enough. Even pictures can be easily taken out of context. Hell, some fake stories even use photos from unrelated news, so even photographic evidence needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
So really, why should I believe anything that gets reposted over 3 corners in the form of unattributed, cropped screenshots?
It's not just professional outlets that create fake news. 4chan regularly does false-flagging to create a more heated discussion. And so does the other side, see mattress girl for example or the gas station thing mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
Lies are cheap on the internet.
And since those stories are a claim that something happened and there is noone to argue the other side my position is that the burden of proof that anything happened at all is on the poster. Otherwise they might be crying wolf.
The issue is that those stories might be just as fabricated as those macedonian fake news sites. Maybe they're created for different reasons, but how are you supposed to trust a collection of unsourced text snippets?
And even if we are charitable and assume that they are grounded in facts they might still be exaggerated because they are more vivid in the memory of the one reporting them than what actually happened.
But if reasonable skepticism tells us that an unknown percentage might be then then they do not "raise awareness".
It just tells us something between "one side is just virtue-signalling, things are mostly peachy" and "things are actually getting worse".
In other words, I'm not getting much useful information out of random clipped images on facebook. The error bars are way too large.