Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan HolidayTrust Me I'm Lying, the most influential book that I've read in the last two years, is probably by Ryan Holidays. This book guides the media ecosystem of the 21st century and shows how online media structures and incentives polarise us with fear and wrath. This book was first published in 2012 and is often quite prophetic about its toxic impact on politics and society by online publication.
Ryan Holiday is a marketer and advertiser specializing in manipulating blogs for his customers. What's a blog, then? A blog is a publication platform online that derives advertising revenue. Blogs vary in size from small local publications fly-by-night to several million-dollar properties such as Gawker and the Huffington Post. Blogs may be independent or linked to an existing media franchise, such as Huffington Post or Politico. The Washington Post hosts, for example, the Monkey Cage policy blog, and CBS hosts MoneyWatch.
Ryan's key observation is that, regardless of how large or small, whether linked to an existing media francophone or not, all blogs are driven by the same financial incentives. The income of a blog can be indicated as (prices per page view) (number of page-views). Because blogs have little control over how much they pay per reader, blogs maximize the number of readers they receive. In addition, the sheer number of blogs and the shallow barrier create a brutal Darwinian market where content is rapidly overtaken by content that does not maximize page views.
Blogs exploit every human psychological defect to maximize the number of people that click on their stories (and so view ads on these stories). Provoking is the main thing. Ryan quotes from a 2012 study by Berger and Milkman showing that content spreads far more rapidly than content, emotionally neutral. The study compared stories on the New York Times website and found that the articles that caused coldness were 34% more susceptible to the most popular mail list than the median article. Also good were articles that induced awe, 30 percent more likely to make the most e-mailed list than the median article. Wrath and awe are both highly emotional (in a negative and positive direction, respectively). Articles that cause low arouse feelings on the flip side, such as sadness, are punishable. Sad articles were 16% less likely to end up with the most e-mailed list than the median article. These psychological facts are restrictions on the types of stories blogs will write. Every story should make people feel anger or awe like a "high-energy" emotion. Thinking, practicing, useful, or pretty, but melancholy stories fall along the way.
Their very structure is also a constraint on blogs. "The medium is the message," the Marshall McLuhan adage applies to blogs as much as it does to TV. The medium is the stack for blogs. Most blogs are arranged in a reverse time-book, with new stories at the top of the page, as more stories come in and percolate down to the bottom. A blog that can always produce something new on the top of the stack can attract additional readers by clicking on and sharing more new content. Ryan notes that a blog's appetite for content is functionally unlike newspapers with a limited number of column inches per day and cable news with a finite number of hours per day. Blogs whose authors win the fastest, irrespective of the quality.
The last limitation on blogs is how new readers are obtained. Generally speaking, people don't sign up for blogs like newspapers or magazines. Instead, the blogs receive traffic from links and headlines shared with social media aggregators, such as Reddit. When stories are transmitted as dissociated titles, every one of them fighting for the reader's attention on itself, the (as is) reputation counts for nothing. The headlines must be as provocative as possible to "hook" the readers. Actually, the interest of the blog is that it misleads the headlines because a reader who clicks on a page and clicks away is still considered to be a page view that earns the blog money. As the history or trustworthiness of the source is not generally taken into account by people who share or click on links, there is no penalty for wasteful time or attention on the blog.
These three restrictions (virality, structure, and disaggregation) create a set of points of entry that allow a media manipulator like Ryan Holiday to influence the content of stories covered by blogs. In contrast to the current wisdom, Ryan noticed that most original online media reports were carried out on smaller blogs whose stories had been collected and summarised by larger publications until the mainstream media and the "national discussion" had reached Ryan. There is, therefore, the reason to change what was in the Washington Post tomorrow by influencing small blogs today.
To do that, Ryan created a process that he called "trading the chain." He was first looking at the large blogs he drew from in the national media outlets. Then he watched the small blogs that those large blogs had drawn from. He would then launch a media campaign to target these smaller blogs, sewing in enough places the same provocative story to be collected and transmitted to the chain until national coverage was received.
One particular example of this is the work he made for Tucker Max, the film I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. In the Washington Post, he wanted to get coverage for the movie. By closely observing the Post sources, he discovered that much of the media coverage in the Post was derived from stories about Gawker. Once again, he found that Gawker pulled his stories from blogs like MediasBistro and Curbed LA, which focused on smaller towns. He then targeted these blogs with a series of provocative events such as the purchase of billboards that promote and then vandalize the film, the call for feminist parties to protest shows in the film, provocative bus publicity, and other aimed acts at social media. When I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell started to cover those blogs, he ensured that sufficient chatter was available to drive the story up to the Washington Post.
The result was that the Washington Post and late-Night TV hosts such as Conan O'Brien interviewed not-to-be-named "Internet celebrities" like Tucker Max. Ryan points out that much of what we regard as "organic" content, spreading by word of mouth, is indeed well designed to cover special celebrities, products, and events with professionalism, like himself.
What is important to note is that all these manipulations make the stories less accurate. In addition, the publishers of these stories cost us nothing to mislead and waste our time and emotional energy. Each of us has a pure externality, as are smokestack fumes or toxic chemicals that go in the supply of water.
If it were only to drive customers to products that they would not otherwise buy, the effects of this media manipulation would probably still be there for Ryan. The increasing use of these manipulation techniques to propagate political ideas and hurt individuals led him to reconsider his profession (and write that book). In the second half of his book, he speaks about the techniques used in sites such as Jezebel and Breitbart News to push American apparel's product to maximize their own page-views and outrage them and their opponents. He believes that a great deal of responsibility can be placed on professional manipulators like himself for the coarsening and polarisation of politics and culture.
Ryan expects us to inoculate ourselves and be less susceptible to media manipulation by writing this book and exposing the actual techniques that manipulators use. Though things are currently dull, Ryan looks back to history to show that today's ecosystem in online media is very similar to the "yellow press" era of the turn of the 20th century. Since he hopes that the current situation is not sustainable, we will eventually build stronger and more trustworthy Internet media, just as provocative tabloids like the New York Herald and The World have finally given way to more reliable publications such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
I found this book to be important personally as it clarifies and illustrates many of the troubling trends I have seen in online media and puts it in a setting in which I can clearly see how it works, how it handles me. While I knew that online media were increasingly provocative and increasingly less accurate, my predecessor resulted from blind evolutionary forces.
Nonetheless, the book was insightful, fun, and rather horrifying. I thought. As a result of the book, I can look at stories like this and look beyond the manipulative elements to see how small this article is. Consequently, I find that the factual content of the news articles is more efficient to extract them and to identify better and avoid so-called "fake news" That's why I believe that Trust Me I am Lying is a strong recommendation.
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