Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
Ryan Holiday
Description
You've seen it all before. A malicious online rumour costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don't know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me. I'm a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs--as much as any one person can. In today's culture...
Blogs like ‘Gawker,’ ‘Buzzfeed’ and the ‘Huffington Post’ drive the media agenda.
Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines.
Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see and watch--online and off.
Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I'm tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I'm pulling back the curtain because I don't want anyone else to get blindsided.
I'm going to explain exactly how the media ‘really’ works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.
Key words: Media, Blogging
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My Notes
Introduction
The media systems very business model rests on exploiting the difference between perception and reality.
It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception – and sell product.
You’ll see we have a media system designed to trick, cajole, and steal every second of the most precious resource in the world – people’s time.
Book 1: How blogs work
It is not news that sells papers, but papers that sell news.
Trump had clearly sensed something that most politicians hadn’t yet realised: that the very culture of Twitter, the economics of online content, had swallowed everything else in the world.
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.
Think about it: where do people find stuff today? They find it online. If something is being chanted about on Facebook or Twitter, it will make its way through to other forms of media and eventually into culture itself. That’s a fact.
If you master the rules that govern blogs, you can be the master of all they determine.
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?
Blogs have a simple action: Change reality through the coverage.
The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.
Most people will opt for what’s easier so they can move onto the next thing.
Online publications compete to get stories first, newspapers compete to ‘confirm it’ and the pundits compete for airtime to have their opinion on it.
It’s a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularising it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.
From the fake, came real action.
‘We need to find a lead steer!’ The media, like any group of animals, gallops in a herd. It takes just one steer to start a stampede. There first level is your lead steer. The rest is just pointing everyone’s attention to the direction it went in.
Example of the process: A gossip blog manufactured a scoop by misrepresenting, deliberately or not, a joke. The scoop was itself misrepresented and misrepresented as it travelled up the chain, going from a small entertainment blog to a sports site to a CBS affiliate in Iowa and eventually to the website of one of the biggest newspapers in the country. What spread was not even a rumour, which at least would have been logical. It was just an empty bit of nothing.
Blogs make their money from selling advertising. These advertisements are paid for by the impression (generally a rate of per thousand impressions). Advertisement x Traffic = Revenue. Every decision a publisher makes is ‘traffic by any means’. Traffic is money. Every ad impression on a site is monetised. If someone clicks on a site (a pageview) and the ad is there, the ad company pays the blog site (publisher) money. Each and every pageview is money in the pocket of the publisher.
Journalists are rarely in the position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are ‘entirely dependent on self-interest sources’ to supply their ‘facts’.
Who are these self-interested sources? Well, anyone selling a product, a message, or an agenda.
The discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous grey area.
In some cases, the story they are chasing is so crazy that they don’t want to risk doing research, because the whole façade would collapse.
Their business is publishing stories, not saying no to potential scoops. They suspend belief because it’s good for business.
The top stories all polarise people: If you make the story threaten people’s behaviour, belief or belongings – you get a huge virus-like dispersion.
If it doesn’t spread, its dead. Content that isn’t shared, isn’t worth anything.
If something is a total bummer, people don’t share it. It’s too depressing. It would make the viewers feel uncomfortable, and unsettling images are no conducive to sharing. Why would bloggers want to pass along bad feelings?
The most powerful predictor of virality is ‘how much anger it provokes’. The most powerful predicted of what spreads online is anger. Sadness depresses are impulse for social sharing.
A powerful predicted of whether content will spread online is the degree of positive or negative emotion a person is made to feel. Both extremes are more desirable than anything in the middle. Anger, fear, excitement, laughter and outrage – these drive us to spread.
The press is often in the evil position of needing to go negative and play tricks with your psyche in order to drive you to share your material online.
In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither want honest or reality. Reality is complicated. Realist is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.
The web has only one currency, and you can use any word you want for it – valence, extremes, arousal, powerfulness, excitement – but it adds up to a false perception.
Get the whole story in the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.
A good question brings twice the response than an empathetic exclamation point.
When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie. The reason bloggers like to use question marks is it lets them get away with a false statement that no one can criticise.
To use an exclamation point is to be final. Being final or authoritative, or helpful, or any of these attributes is avoided, because they don’t bait user engagement. And engaged users is where the money is.
Getting engaged with content: Before objecting that ‘user engagement’ is a good thing, let’s look at it in practice. Pretend for a second that you read an article on some blog about an issue that makes you angry. Angry enough that you ‘must’ let the author know how you feel about it: you go to leave a comment. You must be logged in to comment, the site tells you. Not yet a member? Register now. Click, a new page comes up with ads all across it. Fill out the form on the page, handing over an email address, gender and city and hit ‘submit’. Damn got the captcha wrong, so the page reloads with another ad. Finally get it right and get the confirmation page (another page, another ad). Check email: Click this link to validate your account. Registration is now complete, it says: another page and another ad. Log in. More pages, more ads, but you have finally ‘engaged’. (Or they ask you to use Facebook to log in so they can better target you to advertisers).
When you do this, you are the sucker. The site doesn’t care about your opinions; they care that, by eliciting it, they score free pageviews. Of course, this kind of manipulation is not new – it’s endemic to all kinds of media.
The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, and spend more time on the site.
Nobody involved actually cares what any of these people think or are feeling – not even a little bit. They just care about the reaction and attention.
You are being played – Social media isn’t a tool to allow humans to communicate with humans.
To string the customer along as long as possible, to deliberately ‘not’ be helpful, is to turn simple readers into pageview-generating machines. The people that win are the people that make things most inconvenient for you – button after button, ads after ads.
To be in the news, make news.
The role of the newspaper is ‘not to instruct but to startle’.
The newspapers thrive best on the calamities of others.
Blogs, websites, newspapers best markers are below;
Prominent headlines that scream excitement about ultimately unimportant news
Lavish use of pictures (often of little relevance).
Imposters, frauds and faked interviews
Colour comics, and big thick Sunday supplement
Ostentatious support for underdog causes
Use of anonymous sources
Prominent coverage of high society (high wealth) and events
It’s mostly the least important news that will find you.
Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or what makes us laugh.
The production of our imagination become the solid facts of society.
Book 2: What blogs mean
The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling chatter talk. Everything you consume online has been ‘optimised’ to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, found – like a trap designed to bait, distract and capture you. Blogs are out to game you – to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers – and they do this every day.
The blogs confirm what you want to be true and what you want to reflect your identity.
That’s what web culture does to you. Psychologists call this the ‘narcotising dysfunction’, when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something. We’re all drowning in a sea of unreality.
We live in a world where at even the highest and most sensitive level information is passed on without being vetted, where the final judgement of truth or falsity does not fall on the outlet reporting it or the person spreading it but on the readers themselves.
We believe if the outlet is legitimate, the stories it breaks are. It’s that simple.
When something is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.
I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Bloggers know this and abuse it. It calls for bloggers to publish first, then verify what they have wrote after they have published it.
Writers and bloggers, follow blindly wherever the wisps of the speculation might take them, do the absolute minimum amount of research or corroboration, and then post the suspect information immediately, as it is known, in a continuous stream.
Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.
Bloggers don’t fabricate news, but they do suspend their disbelief, common sense and responsibility in order to get big stories first. Its ‘get something up’ v ‘get things right’.
The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what ‘others are saying’. This changes the news from what happened to what someone else is saying the news is.
Stocks move on news – any news – and rumours passed on by high-profile blogs are no exception. It does not matter if they are updated or corrected or part of a learning curve; blogs are read by real people who form opinions and make decisions as they read.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire;
The real trick in the game is to repeat something enough times that it begins to sound true.
You can do this with ‘fake’ Twitter accounts or ‘fake followers’ that bombard influencers like journalists with information.
Using fake accounts or ‘supports’ to show real opinion around the internet.
Whenever you see an online conversation suddenly interrupted by what seems like an unhinged person ranting about this issue or that issue.
This might catch your attention for a second.
Your brain tells you ‘hey I got this from three different sources’.
So, you click or follow.
But you don’t realise it all traces back to the same place and might have reaches you via bots posing as real people.
On corrections – The original story always spreads faster than the correction. And no one believes the correction anyway. The first published story we hold tight with our beliefs and don’t want to believe it now false via a ‘correction’. We see the snapshot and draw our conclusions. We don’t check back on the blog to see if it’s true or not. As soon as it’s read, we think of it as fact, it’s on paper. Trying to correct it only tightens the grip in our mind that it must ‘have been true’. The corrections don’t fix the error – they usually backfire and make misrepresentation worse.
Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived afterword.
The more extreme a headline, the longer participants spend processing it, and the more likely they are to believe it. The human mind, first believes, then evaluates.
We place an inordinate amount of trust in things that have been written down. This comes from centuries of knowing that writing was expensive – that it was safe to assume that someone would rarely waste the resources to commit to paper something untrue. The written word and the use of it conjures up deep associations with authority and credence that are thousands of years old.
On degrading others - We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule and congratulating ourselves on their defects. There’s a sense of ‘trial by comments section’. What some people call a ‘despicable personal attack’ other people call it journalism. Our online culture is both fuelled by and ruled by this bitterness and anger that pretend that other people aren’t human beings.
The news might be fake, but the decisions we make from it are not. From pseudo-environments come actual behaviour.
When you see a blog or headline starting with ‘according’ to a tipster. Know that’s someone making fake news.
When you hear a friend saying that ‘I was reading that….’. Know that today the sad fact is that they probably just glanced at something on a blog.
Conclusion
The dominant culture medium (means of doing something), determines culture itself.
Television is no longer the main stage of culture. The internet, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are. And their demands control our culture exactly as television once did. Only the internet worships a different god: traffic. It lives and dies by clicks, because that’s what drives ad revenue and influence.
When intelligent people read: they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information? There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction.
