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Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Kindle Edition

by Ryan Holiday (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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The cult classic that predicted the rise of fake news—revised and updated for the post-Trump, post-Gawker age.

Hailed as "astonishing and disturbing" by the Financial Times and "essential reading" by TechCrunch at its original publication, former American Apparel marketing director Ryan Holiday’s first book sounded a prescient alarm about the dangers of fake news. It's all the more relevant today.

Trust Me, I’m Lying was the first book to blow the lid off the speed and force at which rumors travel online—and get "traded up" the media ecosystem until they become real headlines and generate real responses in the real world. The culprit? Marketers and professional media manipulators, encouraged by the toxic economics of the news business.

Whenever you see a malicious online rumor costs a company millions, politically motivated fake news driving elections, a product or celebrity zooming from total obscurity to viral sensation, or anonymously sourced articles becoming national conversation, someone is behind it. Often someone like Ryan Holiday.

As he explains, “I wrote this book to explain how media manipulators work, how to spot their fingerprints, how to fight them, and how (if you must) to emulate their tactics. Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where trolls hijack debates, marketers help write the news, opinion masquerades as fact, algorithms drive everything to extremes, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m pulling back the curtain because it’s time the public understands how things really work. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.”

Review

“Holiday effectively maps the news media landscape. . . . Media students and bloggers would do well to heed Holiday’s informative, timely, and provocative advice.”
— Publishers Weekly

“This book will make online media giants very, very uncomfortable.”
— Drew Curtis, founder, Fark.com

“Ryan Holiday’s brilliant exposé of the unreality of the Internet should be required reading for every thinker in America.”
— Edward Jay Epstein, author of How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft

“[Like] Upton Sinclair on the blogosphere.”
— Tyler Cowen, MarginalRevolution.com, author of Average Is Over

“Ryan Holiday is the internet’s sociopathic id.”
— Dan Mitchell, SF Weekly

“Ryan Holiday is a media genius who promotes, inflates, and hacks some of the biggest names and brands in the world.”
— Chase Jarvis, founder and CEO, CreativeLive

“Ryan has a truly unique perspective on the seedy underbelly of digital culture.”
— Matt Mason, former director of marketing, BitTorrent

“While the observation that the internet favors speed over accuracy is hardly new, Holiday lays out how easily it is to twist it toward any end. . . . Trust Me, I’m Lying provides valuable food for thought regarding how we receive— and perceive— information.”
— New York Post

About the Author

Ryan Holiday is a media strategist for notorious clients such as Tucker Max and Dov Charney. After dropping out of college at 19 to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, he went on to advise many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians. He is currently the director of marketing at American Apparel, where his work is internationally known. His campaigns have been used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google and written about in AdAge, the New York Times, Gawker and Fast Company. He currently lives in New Orleans and writes at RyanHoliday.net.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

It is not news that sells papers, but papers that sell news.

—BILL BONNER, MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS

I call to your attention an article in the New York Times written at the earliest of the earliest junctures of the 2012 presidential election, nearly two years before votes would be cast.11    It told of a then obscure figure, Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota. Pawlenty was not yet a presidential candidate. He had no campaign director, no bus, few donors, and little name recognition. In fact, he did not even have a campaign. It was January 2011, after all. What he did have was a beat reporter from the blog Politico following him from town to town with a camera and a laptop, reporting every moment of his noncampaign.    It’s a bit peculiar, if you think about it. Even the New York Times, the newspaper that spends millions of dollars a year for a Baghdad bureau, which can fund investigative reports five or ten years in the making, didn’t have a reporter covering Pawlenty. Yet Politico, a blog with only a fraction of the resources of a major newspaper, did. The Times was covering Politico covering a noncandidate.    It was a little like a Ponzi scheme, and like all such schemes, it went from boom to bust. Pawlenty became a candidate, coverage of him generated millions of impressions online, then in print, and finally on television, before he flamed out and withdrew from the race. Despite all of this, his candidacy’s impact on the election was significant and real enough that the next Republican front-runner courted Pawlenty’s endorsement.    As off-putting as it is, that story seems quaint in light of the 2016 election. I’m not a Tim Pawlenty fan, but he was at least a legitimate politician who conceivably could have run for president. Donald Trump had “considered” a presidential run for as long as I have been alive. His subsequent election actually obscures the extent to which this was all a publicity stunt—clearly he was not too serious about politics or he might have spent at least a few months over thirty years trying to acquire a passing knowledge of policy. At the very least one assumes he might have said fewer dumb, unguarded things when there were microphones around. As late as 2012, he was still playing this publicity game, toying with running because it always made for good headlines. And what became of all this? Nothing. Because there was enough discretion, enough unity within the media that there was still some semblance of a line. Politics was at least partly serious business—and so was reporting the news.    But by 2015, when Trump declared his candidacy once again, that was no longer true. He wouldn’t have actually run if he didn’t think things were different, if he didn’t at least subconsciously realize that his incendiary, provocative, and unpredictable personality would be traffic and attention gold online and offline. The man clearly sensed something that most politicians hadn’t yet realized: that the culture of Twitter, the economics of online content, had swallowed everything else in the world.    There’s a famous twentieth-century political cartoon about the Associated Press, which was, at the time, the wire service responsible for supplying news to the majority of the newspapers in the United States. In it an AP agent is pouring different bottles into a city’s water supply. The bottles are labeled “lies,” “prejudice,” “slander,” “suppressed facts,” and “hatred.” The image reads: THE NEWS—POISONED AT ITS SOURCE.    I think of blogs and social media as today’s newswires. They’re what poisoned the debate and the clarity of a nation of some 325 million people. They’re how we fell for one of the greatest cons in history.

BLOGS MATTER

By “blog” I’m referring collectively to all online publishing. That’s everything from Twitter accounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers. I don’t care whether the owners consider themselves blogs or not. The reality is that they are all subject to the same incentives, and they fight for attention with similar tactics.2    Most people don’t understand how today’s information cycle really works. Many have no idea of how much their general worldview is influenced by the way news is generated online. What begins online ends offline.    Although there are millions of blogs out there, you’ll notice some mentioned a lot in this book: Gawker Media, Business Insider, Breitbart, Politico, Vox, BuzzFeed, Vice, the Huffington Post, Medium, Drudge Report, and the like. This is not because they are the most widely read, but instead because they are mostly read by the media elite. Not only that, but their proselytizing founders, Nick Denton, Henry Blodget, Jonah Peretti, and Arianna Huffington, have an immense amount of influence as thought leaders. A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers. It doesn’t matter how many followers someone has if what they produce ends up going viral.    Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read online—certain blogs more than others. Stories from blogs also filter into real conversations and rumors that spread from person to person through word of mouth. In short, blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and “informed” friends—discover and borrow the news. This hidden cycle gives birth to the memes that become our cultural references, the budding stars who become our celebrities, the thinkers who become our gurus, and the news that becomes our news.    Think about it: Where do people find stuff today? They find it online. This is just as true for normal people as it is for the so-called gatekeepers. If something is being chatted about on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, it will make its way through all other forms of media and eventually into culture itself. That’s a fact.    When I figured this out early in my career in public relations, I had a thought that only a naive and destructively ambitious twentysomething would have: If I master the rules that govern blogs, I can be the master of all they determine. It was, essentially, access to a fiat over culture.    It may have been a dangerous thought, but it wasn’t hyperbole. In the Pawlenty case, the guy could have become the president of the United States of America. Donald Trump did become president. One early media critic put it this way: We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press? What rules over the media, he concluded, rules over the country. In this case, what ruled over Politico literally almost ruled over everyone.    To understand what makes blogs act—why Politico followed Pawlenty around, why the media ended up giving Trump something like $4.6 billion worth of free publicity—is the key to making them do what you want (or stopping this broken system). Learn their rules, change the game. That’s all it takes to control public opinion.

SO, WHY DID POLITICO FOLLOW PAWLENTY?

On the face of it, it’s pretty crazy. Pawlenty’s phantom candidacy wasn’t newsworthy, and if the New York Times couldn’t afford to pay a reporter to follow him around, Politico shouldn’t have been able to.    It wasn’t crazy. Blogs need things to cover. The Times has to fill a newspaper only once per day. A cable news channel has to fill twenty-four hours of programming 365 days a year. But blogs have to fill an infinite amount of space. The site that covers the most stuff wins.    Political blogs know that their traffic goes up during election cycles. Since traffic is what they sell to advertisers, elections equal increased revenue. Unfortunately, election cycles come only every few years. Worse still, they end. Blogs have a simple solution: Change reality through the coverage.    With Pawlenty, Politico was not only manufacturing a candidate, they were manufacturing an entire leg of the election cycle purely to profit from it. It was a conscious decision. In the story about his business, Politico’s executive editor, Jim VandeHei, tipped his hand to the New York Times: “We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly. Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan. We’re trying to take a leap forward in front of everyone else.” Today, a few election cycles later, Politico has three hundred employees. It has spawned countless competitors, some of whom are even bigger.    When a blog like Politico tried to leap in front of everyone else, the person they arbitrarily decided to cover was turned into an actual candidate. The campaign starts gradually, with a few mentions on blogs, moves on to “potential contender,” begins to be considered for debates, and is then included on the ballot. Their platform accumulates real supporters who donate real time and money to the campaign. The campaign buzz is reified by the mass media, who covers and legitimizes whatever is being talked about online.    Pawlenty’s campaign may have failed, but for blogs and other media, it was a profitable success. He generated millions of pageviews for blogs, was the subject of dozens of stories in print and online, and had his fair share of television time. When journalists first covered Trump, they loved him because they thought he was a joke. They loved how he polarized the audience and how each crazy thing he said or did made for better headlines. Over time, he became a serious candidate—repeated, incessant media coverage can do that—and despite the supposed liberal bias of the media, they continued to shower him with attention. He was great for business.    In case you didn’t catch it, here’s the cycle again:

Political blogs need things to cover; traffic increases during election

Reality (election far away) does not align with this

Political blogs create candidates early, gravitating toward the absurd and controversial; election cycle starts earlier

The person they cover, by virtue of coverage, becomes actual candidate (or president)

Blogs profit (literally); the public loses    You’ll see this cycle repeated again and again in this book. It’s true for celebrity gossip, politics, business news, and every other topic blogs cover. The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.    The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth. With the mass media—and today, mass culture—relying on the web for the next big thing, it is a set of incentives with massive implications.    Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen. This is just one facet of the economics of blogging, but it’s a critical one. When we understand the logic that drives these business choices, those choices become predictable. And what is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however you or I choose.    Later in the 2012 election, Politico moved the goalposts again to stay on top. Speed stopped working so well, so they turned to scandal to upend the race once more. Remember Herman Cain, the preposterous, media-created candidate who came after Pawlenty? After surging ahead as the lead contender for the Republican nomination, and becoming the subject of an exhausting number of traffic-friendly blog posts, Cain’s candidacy was utterly decimated by a sensational but still strongly denied scandal reported by . . . you guessed it: Politico.3    And so another noncandidate was created, made real, and then taken out. Another one bit the dust so that blogs could fill their cycle. In some ways the reliability of this cycle—in which despite all the absurdity eventually a normal candidate would win out (be it Mitt Romney or whoever)—was the worst thing that could have happened to us. Because it meant we thought Trump would eventually lose. He’ll eventually come crashing back down to earth. Eventually people will see who he is. He can’t avoid this forever.    Except none of that was true. That’s what happens when you feed the monster. It defies all expectations and rules.       II

TRADING UP THE CHAIN: HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS

Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity. And it works to my advantage most of the time, because I think most reporters have liked me packaging things for them. Most people will opt for what’s easier, so they can move on to the next thing. Reporters are measured by how often their stuff gets on Drudge. It’s a bad way to be, but it’s reality.

—KURT BARDELLA, FORMER PRESS SECRETARY FOR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN DARRELL ISSA

In the introduction I explained a scam I call “trading up the chain.” It’s a strategy I developed that manipulates the media through recursion. I can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. I create, to use the words of one media scholar, a “self-reinforcing news wave.” People like me do this every day.    The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause.    A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally.    Following the strategy I helped lay out, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e?mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this, he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site.

1 See my column “Electile Dysfunction: Why the Media Turned a Foregone Conclusion into a Horse Race” in the New York Observer for a complete account of the 2012 election.

2 I have never been a fan of the word “blogosphere” and will use it only sparingly.

3 To paraphrase Budd Schulberg, from his memoir Moving Pictures: “It is not only a case of the tail wagging the dog, they were trying to take over the bark too.” --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0074VTHH0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio (July 19, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 19, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3217 KB
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Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
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Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 346 pages

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Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. His books like The Obstacle Is the Way,Ego Is the Enemy,The Daily Stoic, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key appear in more than 40 languages and have sold more than 5 million copies. Together, they've spent over 300 weeks on the bestseller lists. He lives outside Austin with his wife and two boys...and a small herd of cows and donkeys and goats. His bookstore, The Painted Porch, sits on historic Main St in Bastrop, Texas.

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The most relevant exposé of online journalism today.

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2012

Verified Purchase

The first review I saw for this book said it could be finished in an afternoon implying that it's consideration as whole need not more than a full day. That kind of casual consumption is the cancer this book fully explores.

I had to put Trust Me I'm Lying down several times over the first couple of chapters. The words were so heavy, pregnant with the weight that can only come from a true exposé that I wanted time to actually digest what I was reading. At 24 I've been on the Internet for 16 years. My very first memory is of my then 13-year-old sister lying to strangers in an online chat room. Lying was a hallmark of the Internet for so long that growing up I was treated with adults constantly reminding the younger generation that, "If you've read it on the Internet, it's simply not true."

Surely when companies started throwing billions of dollars at online publishing as newspaper subscriptions all but dried up there was a policy shift right? According to this book, no. At least where the author is a blogger and the blogger's full time employment comes from "writing".

Ryan paints the entire online publishing industry with a wide brush, but backs up his claims not just with relevant anecdotes, quotes from prominent names, but also and more importantly the philosophy that drives these people and the business at large. As much time Ryan spent writing, manipulating, and toying with blogs I've spent reading them. Luckily the industry that concerns me didn't concern him, and I think that's where some lines needed to be drawn which Ryan doesn't actually acknowledge in his book, but it's not necessarily in his interest to do so.

My review actually ends here: The Internet is full of liars. Ryan Holiday played the part for a while, discovered how easy it is to do, did it for what he amounted to believe was a good purpose, placed some bad bets, and overall decided that this isn't where online media should be today. His knack for being a very accomplished liar or "troll" as Internet syntax goes shouldn't in any way malign his message. You are being lied to, all the time, the Internet is not safer than Fox News or CNBC. In fact in many ways it's far, far worse. You shouldn't be comfortable or complicit with news this way. His reputation is actually stellar, in fact I've known him for five years and I look up to him not just for his professional acumen but for who he is as a person. He will probably have to play out his role for a few more months while his message is propagated because people like the scandal more than they ought to right now. They should be hearing the actual message, that the Internet is a dredge of corruption, and barring a huge, huge change, it will continue to be. If the messenger was a 20 something intelligent thoughtful individual that was hardworking and honest, well, he'd be boring. His book would by extension probably be boring. It's a weird, dark and twisted kind of comedy that when I Google his name the top articles are basically sleights, unfounded accusations and snarky disparagement of his name and work.

If you're reading the book and stumble upon this review. You should be asking, how many of these articles, how many of these bloggers actually flew out to New Orleans and tried to write a real story? How many people sat in his living room and marveled at the sheer volume of books that one kid could possibly read, let alone understand? No, they probably realized it's just as easy to say he got this book deal, his job at American Apparel through connections, he's a liar, he's just making shit up, and everything is fine the way it is.

Now. I did have some problems with the book which I will outline here. I don't think a lack of thoroughness was the problem but there were a couple of angles which Ryan doesn't consider and I'd like to point them out here.

Here's an example. Holiday stumbles upon the realization that blogs absolutely love Press Releases. In my industry (computer science) this is a given. My fellow techies eat up official Press Releases because you can't lie about a chip size or a gigahertz. Watching Engaget uncover over a six month period 300 phones that are all using a certain technology is vital to how not just my company reacts, but how thousands and thousands of small and large tech companies react.

Let's look at how Apple went out of it's way to create a perfect mobile browser experience in it's first generation of phones.

Instead of a quiet panic to catch up, what if the industry at large focussed on text-message based communication instead? Would you still enjoy browsing the Internet on your phone if only 1 out of every 100 websites was optimized for your 3″ screen?

Meanwhile all of your friends have instant communication with banks, stock trading, travel deals, and sports scores? What takes them a half second on their non-Apple Taxed phone takes you several minutes. Luckily it didn't turn out to be the case. While both were viable technologies at solving a single problem (making information available at your actual finger tip touches), but both hardware and software trended towards the mobile browser and eventually apps. How? Could media manipulation have played a part? Most assuredly not.

Networks like AT&T quickly churned out 3G and then 4G networks, processors shrunk drastically, and within 36 months mobile websites found a standard and stuck to it.

No amount of reality distortion from Steve Jobs or Ryan Holiday could have changed the arch that this industry followed. But while it was happening blog coverage was one of the most important facets to how quickly everything moved. All of a sudden you didn't need to spend $20,000 annually to attend tech events from around the country. Shoddy journalism might get the details wrong online, but this was easily remedied at the water cooler where discussion about what you just interpreted online happens to meet the thick high wall of reality that is a Project Manager, Sys Admin, or even your average code monkey.

Some things just don't work in computing, engineers know these limits, and this is more of a blessing than a curse.

Unfortunately not every industry behaves as mine. Ryan does go into depth about how real companies and extremely important events like electing a President are all shaped by standards which have set the bar so low that responsibility doesn't exist in any form. `Trust Me' talks about the immediacy problem blogs have created and how it doesn't really contribute to a better story. Publishing news online before it's vetted gives us a few minutes or maybe a day's advance notice and the majority of the problems regarding our complicit approval of information that refuses to actually inform could be solved by taking away the immediacy.

But what about when immediacy is vital? Take the snipers in Libya. They were taken down by the Social Media shotgun. Whenever a crew of snipers were spotted via camera phones, they were hastily shared on Twitter and local news literally saving lives and turning the tide for the rebels, who would send in grenadiers to take out their crow's nests.

Perhaps there's a story to be written as well, but that kind of social media news is clearly a new spigot of information that doesn't appear as a counterpoint in Holiday's book to show how we can be taking advantage of instant news. But the book as it's written isn't meant to be a full digest of online media at large, it's a confession tape of a media abuser so it's obvious why it's left out. I just didn't see the immediacy problem as big when it comes to Twitter, it has it's uses for news, but I thought it was understood that 140 characters isn't enough.

My last critique is only that he admits to not knowing how to solve the myriad of problems facing online news at large other than confessing he repeatedly took advantage of chinks in their armor and hopes by revealing his secrets they'll be better protected. If I worked for the New York Times I'd be sending Ryan an all white stetson in appreciation instead of casually correcting a post when he pretended to be a vinyl record lover and calling it a day.

I was genuinely curious as to what his solutions might be and was a little disappointed to not even see one. Could you gamify the news so that accurate, and well written coverage gets rewarded in some arbitrary but entertaining way while shoddy inaccurate news is punished? Would a paywall ostensibly solve the bloggers' problem of having to publish far too many posts for quotas? How about utilizing digital wallets and social networks to create a system where people get credit for being sources, but give the credit back when consuming articles? In that scenario you establish a record of someone's name and wall off the garden without ever actually exchanging money.

Oh well, perhaps in the next one.

Awesome work Ryan, it was a great read. I'm not even lying.

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LenZen

Trading Up the Chain: Blogs, Bias, and the Dilemma of Delegated Trust

Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

In "Trust Me, I'm Lying," Ryan Holiday pulls back the curtain to reveal what is going on behind the scenes of online “blogs." For the book, Holiday defines a blog as any online site, from single-person operations up to the New York Times, which either purports to report current news or provides commentary. Holiday discusses how easy he found it to manipulate the blogosphere and how it ultimately creates a world of unreality, which, unfortunately, does intersect with the real world enough to cause destruction to the individual lives and businesses in the news.

Summary of Contents

Holiday's central thesis is that the blogosphere suffers from two major and interrelated problems:

The first problem is that blogs suffer from fierce competition for table scraps of revenue. Since there is so little money to be made for most in blogging, bloggers race to publish first, most sensationally, and with complete disregard for the time required to ensure even reasonable veracity of their stories.

The second related problem is that blogs seem to operate on a "delegated trust" model. Holiday argues that before blogs, news media had developed editorial standards that were about the same from publication to publication. This meant that if one outlet was reporting something, others had some confidence that the first had done their due diligence regarding the story's veracity. Holiday shows that there is now a wide variety of editorial standards, including, in many cases, none, that break this model.

Holiday relates numerous cases showing how he exploited the weaknesses in the blogosphere to feed false information into the monster and then "trade it up the chain." For instance, starting with the lowest level blogs, hungry for any traffic that could go viral, he could get them to publish wholly made-up "leaks" from "anonymous sources" that he says were never verified. From this, a buzz would be created on low-level blogs that he would then mention to higher-level blogs, asking, "How can you not be covering this?" Holiday claims that by using this basic method, he and others could get publications all the way up to the New York Times to report on information completely manufactured out of whole cloth.

Along with relating numerous instances of garbage information entering the system at the lowest levels and percolating up to the top, Holiday examines some of the underlying social science explaining why the system is so vulnerable to manipulation.

Evaluation of the Book

Given the amount of misinformation out there, which only continued to explode after the publication of the revised edition in 2017, this is the kind of book that any citizen of a democracy who interacts with online media or is affected by it (a long way of saying everyone) should read. Indeed, this book is now mandatory in many journalism schools and is required reading for new employees entering the news media to help their outlet avoid being victims of these manipulations.

Although this book was a highly worthwhile read, it leaned a little too heavily toward numerous case studies instead of spending time on the underlying theory for me. In the preface, Holiday makes it clear, however, that this was a deliberate choice as he wanted to write a book on this critical topic that would be read instead of an academic treatise that would be ignored. Holiday used all the techniques he learned from the blogosphere, including heavy media manipulation, to have the book reach as extensive an audience as possible. Some of this is clearly demonstrated in the organization of the book. The chapters are short. Each is further broken down into multiple short sections with very few blocks of text longer than even a couple of pages. It is all designed to be exceptionally easy to consume.

Although presenting much interesting theory, for example, research on how little time viewers spend reading an article and how likely they are to immediately "bounce" from a page, the tilting toward case studies came at the expense of making the stories repetitive after a while. I often read a story and wondered what new principle it was trying to establish versus what had already been established by previous stories.

The second significant weakness of the book is that although it does delve somewhat into politics, it could have gone much deeper into underlying theories, such as "my side bias," of why people are so prone to political bias and how the media seems just as affected by these biases or, perhaps, even more so, than everyone else. Although the book's conclusion is already bleak, Holiday underestimated just how extreme political polarization would become, a situation that events since 2020, especially, have laid bare.

In addition to these two weaknesses, it was unclear how everything described comes together in some cases. For example, Holiday mentions that there are a number of low readership blogs that are read by some very important people and thus have influence far beyond what their reader count would suggest. At the same time, Holiday says that since these blogs are tiny and do not get much traffic, they are easily manipulated by manipulations offering them more traffic. This claim did not make much sense to me. First, how does Holiday know where these low-traffic but influential blogs are? Second, it seems that the only way that important, and presumably at least somewhat intelligent, people would pay attention is if they were publishing high-quality content, as opposed to any junk that would generate traffic.

Conclusion

Despite the weaknesses mentioned, I understand that the book was written the way it was for a reason: to make it as accessible as possible. Given that many feel, looking back at historical examples, that online misinformation is following a pattern that has a high chance of becoming a risk to American democracy, this book provides an excellent look behind the scenes at how the online misinformation sausage is made.

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Alain R Dumonceaux

Unplug From The Matrix

Reviewed in Canada on October 20, 2023

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a truly disturbing book that reveals the underbelly of how we are manipulated in the press and social media.

Camila

Sobre a aparência geral

Reviewed in Brazil on December 17, 2021

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Veio um pouco amassado. Na descrição diz que são 400 páginas, mas na verdade são 360 mais ou menos. Mas veio muito rápido, em 2 dias!

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Juan Aceves

Buen libro

Reviewed in Mexico on May 2, 2021

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Si te gusta el marketing, este libro es increíble porque se sale de lo convencional y te muestra cómo las campañas o estrategias que vemos muchas veces están manipuladas.
La primera mitad que es de enseñanzas está muy buena. A partir de la segunda mitad que son puras anecdotas, se vuelve un poco pesado

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Anonyme

A must read

Reviewed in France on January 14, 2023

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Disturbing but interesting, it will totally change your point of view about online news

Fabrizio Cucciniello

Un super testo che vi aprirà un mondo ancora attualissimo

Reviewed in Italy on March 13, 2021

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che dire un vero e proprio capolavoro. Un libro che tutti non solo chi fa marketing, dovrebbe avere nella propria libreria. è un testo che fa luce su uno dei settori più influenti e complicati di questo secolo. conoscere è importante per capire e orientare le proprie scelte in un mondo sempre più connesso e tecnologico, dove le informazioni che vengono condivise e girano rapidamente nella rete possono provocare risultati che influiscono sulla vita di milioni di persone punto un testo da divorare leggere e rileggere. Straconsigliato

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Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Kindle Edition

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