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

At the age of 25, before he wrote about Stoicism, Ryan Holiday wreck havoc the media and marketing world by telling the insider’s truth of what he personally experienced and witnessed as a professional within the industry. As Holiday remarked, “[m]y job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you. I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse my understanding of the internet to do it."He was most certainly not the only one doing this, however, in fact later on as the book progresses he mentions some of the best (or worst?) in the industry, the creme de la creme of the media manipulator, who funnel millions of dollars to online publications to get page views, control the scoops and breaking news that fill our Facebook and other social media feeds, and some tricks and unbelievable sins that would make our jaw drop in disbelieve.But before any of this, he first confessed to his own sins. “I have flown bloggers across the country,” Holiday admitted, “boosted their revenue by buying fake traffic, written their stories for them, fabricated elaborate ruses to capture their attention, and even hired their family members. I’ve probably sent enough gift cards and T-shirts to fashion bloggers to clothe a small country. Why did I do all this? Because it was the best way to get what I wanted for my clients: attention.”And that’s the key word that is repeated again and again in this book, attention. All of these clickbaits, polarisations, provocative comments, advertisement placements, social media algorithms, and all the sensational and viral contents are all generated to grab our attention in an increasingly saturated world for, well, attention.Because the truth of the matter is, as the philosopher and journalist Chris Hedges wrote, “[i]n an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”So instead, according to Holiday, "[t]he most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evoked.” In other words, the fake news and fake headline that “feel true", information that is distorted into something that will stick to the emotional spectrum of the audience, which ultimately will turn into something that spreads and drive people to click on the news.Indeed, the reality on the ground is the media don't actually care about the issues they are provoking much outrage about, and neither do social media. Instead, they only care about what it means for them: how much traffic and time spent on site that these issues generate.As Holiday puts it, “[t]hings must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation.”This, in essence, what helps create the artificial modern world where everybody are competing to get their 15 minutes of fame, where “netizens” can quickly take down and belittle some people as quickly as making them a superstar trending topic, which make the rise of the clickbait culture, polarising online debates, and the rise of yotubers, instagram influencers, etc, a little bit more sense.As Holiday commented, “It used to be that someone had to be a national hero before you got the privilege of the media and the public turning on you. You had to be a president or a millionaire or an artist. Now we tear people down just as we’ve begun to build them up. We do this to our fameballs. Our viral video stars. Our favorite new companies. Even random citizens who pop into the news because they did something interesting, unusual, or stupid. First we celebrate them; then we turn to snark, and then, finally, to merciless decimation. No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.”Moreover, this book also provides tremendous insights into the inner workings of the online publishing industry (or what Holiday refer as blogs) as well as social media, with all their structures, and their means for surviving and thriving. It touches the complicated subject of subtle corruption (which involve no direct bribe money) and how it is being done rampantly, the ugly picture of the economics behind the spread of news online, how to create the perfect clickbait articles, even how reality TV sucks in viewers.It also exposes the problem of journalistic credibility, such as the scary rate of reporters using wikipedia as a source (and how a simple edit on the wikipedia page can lead to a false or advantageous reporting from the media), and the ever increasing revolving door problem between bloggers and the giants that they supposed to report on with objectivity, as Holiday commented: “what blogger is going to do real reporting on companies like Google, or Twitter when there is the potential for a lucrative job down the road? What writer is going to burn a source if they view their job as a networking play?”Reading this book has made me able to differentiate between a real investigative reporting and a viral scoop taken from smaller blogs or social media. I can now see the invincible hands working behind a viral story, or when there’s a story fabricated from thin air to generate more clicks, or when a multiple media deliberately use an already misled claims and watch it spread like wildfire, and I can see all the progress of the scoop in the scale between obscurity and viral sensation.Ironically, many firms now require their employees to read Trust Me I’m Lying, while many blogs and journalism schools also ask their writers and student to study this book. It is similar like how Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker - a book that exposed the rotten culture of 1980s Wall Street - somehow attracts people to work at Wall Street. Although at this point it makes perfect sense for these people to understand all of these tricks (for better or worse), but still, this tells a lot about the state of the industry. The mad men of the 1950s Madison Avenue would be very proud.

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.

It’s easy to check the news feed on the web “for a few minutes” and end up clicking through news story after news story looking for something worth reading. There was nothing useful.I picked up “Trust Me I’m Lying” to learn how media manipulation works and to understand the how and why. It made me realize how easily I fall for the traps and tricks used to get my attention and to get me click on something. Learning about how blogs (all online publishing) work and what they actually mean in the real world is fascinating and scary and something every user should be aware of because what you read is distorted and makes it very hard to know if you are reading is fact or fiction. I am now more aware of my online behavior now and am more discerning about what I choose to read online. This is a life skill.The appendix has examples of comments from actual media manipulators. Some of what they did was very disturbing, distorting reality for a specific result (usually not for the common good) and making hard to trust information on blogs. It made me question past decisions I have made and reminded me that I need to be more aware of now and in the future.I read the revised edition of the book and ebook and listened to the audible of the original edition. Even though there were the differences, they were minor. Listening to the audible version reinforced the ideas in the book and helped draw me into the book even more. I got more out of the experience this way.

This book can be summed up thusly: get some small time bloggers to blog about something you want, then tip off some larger blogs who will think there is genuine news, then tip off some larger blogs/news sites and repeat this process until you're in the main stream news.This book could have been written in one chapter, which is my pet peeve when it comes to books.

First half, absolute gold - haven’t folded so many corners in my life.Second half, didn’t finish it. The book continuously reiterates the same retorhic from start to finish about the flaws of the press... after you probably ‘got it’ after the first chapter. Could easily have been 50% shorter but that 50% was fantastic.

It's a great guide to how the media works and not just blogging. He uses his own experience to describe the ecosystem of news and put it into context. The context is that there has always been challenges with the truthfulness of news but now it is 'free' there is less motivation to do original checking and research. He has plenty of modern quotes and also examples that are 100 years old. I grow more sceptical of all the media but I needed a framework to understand it and this book has helped me understand why they do the things they do.

This is probably the most important book you will read. Especially in the modern climate where, blogs are more important than ever. This book lays it out clearly, how blogs really are the modern yellow press and should not be trusted. This book focuses mainly on blogs, but Holiday shows how even supposed respectable publications take carefully laid out bait and run with it.

I would recommend this to anyone. A very readable and entertaining account of how the online media is manipulated and how stories grow. Lots of lessons in here, and Ryan Holliday is an interesting guy. I particularly enjoyed reading about how he reconciles his ethics with his work. He also writes very engagingly, once I picked this up I couldn't put it down.