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

by Ryan Holiday

If you were being kind, you would say my job is in marketing and public relations, or online strategy and advertising. But that’s a polite veneer to hide the harsh truth. I am, to put it bluntly, a media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive. My 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.

I used blogs to control the news.

I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow. But because of the way that blogging is structured—from the way bloggers are paid by the pageview to the way blog posts must be written to catch the reader’s attention—this was all very easy to do. The system eats up the kind of material I produce. So as the manufactured storm I created played itself out in the press, real people started believing it, and it became true.

Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain—from a tiny blog to a website of a local news network to Reddit to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I “leak” a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.

I grew up online, and I knew that in every community there were trolls and tricksters. Like many people, I remained a believer. I thought the web was a meritocracy, and that the good stuff generally rose to the top. But spending serious time in the media underworld, watching as the same outlets who fell for easy marketing stunts seriously report on matters of policy or culture will disabuse you of that naïveté. It will turn that hope into cynicism.

In addiction circles, those in recovery also use the image of the monster as a warning. They tell the story of a man who found a package on his porch. Inside was a little monster, but it was cute, like a puppy. He kept it and raised it. The more he fed it, the bigger it got and the more it needed to be fed. He ignored his worries as it grew bigger, more intimidating, demanding, and unpredictable, until one day, as he was playing with it, the monster attacked and nearly killed him. The realization that the situation was more than he could handle came too late—the man was no longer in control. The monster had a life of its own.

We live in a world of many hustlers, and you are the mark. The con is to build a brand off the backs of others. Your attention and your credulity are being stolen.

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.

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.

The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.

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.

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.

These sites won’t write about just anything, though, so you need to create chatter or a strong story angle to hook this kind of sucker. Their illusion of legitimacy comes at the cost of being slightly more selective when it comes to what they cover. But it is worth the price, because it will grant the bigger websites in your sights later the privilege of using magic words like “NBC is reporting . . .”

Getting to this level usually involves less direct pushing and a lot more massaging. The sites that have already taken your bait are now on your side. They desperately want their articles to get as much traffic as possible, and being linked to or mentioned on national sites is how they do that.

Three or four links are the makings of a trend piece, or even a controversy—that’s all major outlets and national websites need to see to get excited.

Every person in the media ecosystem (with the exception of a few at the top layer) is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes.

One kook and one overeager young journalist unintentionally show why trading up the chain—feeding the monster—can be so dangerous (though for Jones, very effective). They weren’t just turning nothing into something. The beast these blogs built up set off needless bloodshed.

This matters, because as businesses designed to make money, the way in which they do business is the main filter for how they do the news. Every story they produce must contort itself to fit this mold—whatever the topic or subject.

Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on a site. A perusing reader is no better than an accidental reader. An article that provides worthwhile advice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten. So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click.

Blogs are built and run with an exit in mind. This is really why they need scoops and acquire marquee bloggers—to build up their names for investors and to show a trend of rapidly increasing traffic. The pressure for this traffic in a short period of time is intense. And desperation, as a media manipulator knows, is the greatest quality you can hope for in a potential victim. Each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense. Blogs are built so someone else will want them—one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones—and millions of dollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets.

But this is just free swag and perks. The easiest way for bloggers to make real money is to transition to a job with an old media company or a tech company. They can build a name and sell it to a sucker, just like their owners and investors are trying to do. Once a blogger builds a personal brand—through scoops or controversy or major stories—they can expect a cushy job at a magazine or start-up desperate for the credibility and buzz that these attributes offer. These lagging companies can then tell shareholders, “See, we’re current!” or “We’re turning things around!”

Things 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.

I had substantial data to back up the fact that chatter correlated with a spike in purchases of whatever product was the subject of the conversation. Armed with this information, I made it my strategy to manufacture chatter by exploiting emotions of high valence: arousal and indignation.

For blogs, practical utility is often a liability. It is a traffic killer. So are other potentially positive attributes. It’s hard to get trolls angry enough to comment while being fair or reasonable. Waiting for the whole story to unfold can be a surefire way to eliminate the possibility for follow-up posts. So can pointing out that an issue is frivolous. Being the voice of reason does also. No blogger wants to write about another blogger who made him or her look bad.

As a marketer, getting something “controversial” to blow up is easy, and it’s the tactic a media manipulator prefers to use over doing something “important.” With limited resources and the constraints of a tight medium, there are only a handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandal, hatred. The media manipulator knows that bloggers know that these things sell—so that’s what we sell them.

A quick run down the list of pseudo-events shows their indispensability to the news business: press releases, award ceremonies, red-carpet events, product launches, anniversaries, grand openings, “leaks,” the contrite celebrity interview after a scandal, the sex tape, the tell-all, the public statement, controversial advertisements, marches on Washington, press junkets, and on and on. These pseudo-events—put on for the sole purpose of generating headlines and media coverage—are real in the sense that they do exist, but they are fake in the sense that they are completely artificial. The event is not intended to accomplish anything itself but instead to introduce certain narratives into the media. If nobody covered them, it’d be like a tree falling in the woods. Pseudo-events are the media manipulator’s secret weapon.

Early Usenet users called this Warnock’s Dilemma, after its originator, Bryan Warnock. The dilemma began with mailing lists but now applies to message boards (why is no one responding to the thread?), blogs (why hasn’t anyone commented?), and websites (why isn’t this generating any chatter?). The answer to any of these questions could just as easily be satisfaction as apathy, and publishers want to know which it is. This dilemma was actually predicted by Orson Scott Card in the 1985 book Ender’s Game. Peter Wiggin creates the online persona of a demagogue named Locke and begins to test the waters by posting deliberately inflammatory comments. Why write this way? his sister asks. Peter replies: “We can’t hear how our style of writing is working unless we get responses—and if we’re bland, no one will answer.” Card understood that it is incredibly difficult to interpret silence in a constructive way. Warnock’s Dilemma, for its part, poses several interpretations: 1. The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There’s nothing more to say except “Yeah, what he said.” 2. The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out. 3. No one read the post, for whatever reason. 4. No one understood the post but no one will ask for clarification, for whatever reason. 5. No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.

As he once said, “Feeding the media is like training a dog. You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” Breitbart did plenty of training in his short time on the scene. Today one of the dog’s masters is gone, sure, but the dog still responds to the same commands.

I did that because the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded by rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find. Breitbart telling his haters to bring it on certainly accomplished this, as did completely side-stepping the Sherrod issue and pretending this was some giant political conspiracy about reparations for slavery. In refusing to acknowledge, even in the slightest, that she might have been innocent of everything he accused her of, Breitbart played it like an old pro. This is what opponents of the alt-right seem to miss. They are trying to make you upset. They want you to be irrationally angry—it’s how they win. Most brands and personalities try to appeal to a wide swath of the population. Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a huge opportunity, because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility.

This is the exact reaction that our current online system produces: apathy without self-awareness. To keep you so caught up and consumed with the bubble that you don’t even realize you’re in one.

“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said. Now you know why sharing, commenting, clicking, and participating are pushed so strongly by blogs and entertainment sites. They don’t want silence. No wonder blogs auto-refresh with new material every thirty seconds. Of course they want to send updates to your phone and include you on e-mail alerts. No one is listening to you—they’re laughing at you. They’re glad you’re distracted. They’re happy you’re posting on social media, because it means you’re not showing up at city council meetings, because it means you’re not voting. It’s time that both sides face up to the incredible manipulation that’s happening to both parties (by that I mean people, not political parties). Twitter isn’t designed to help you get in and get out with the best information as quickly as possible—it’s supposed to suck you into either a contentious world of argument and debate or an echo chamber that reassures you everyone thinks like you do. Facebook is supposedly one of the largest news sources in the world, and days after the election, it denied that the news it shared could have possibly impacted users’ behavior in a significant way. With manipulative tactics that range from exploiting the so-called attention gap to giving voice to propagandistic campaign surrogates to addictive UX features to editors warping coverage around their own “narrative,” we’re all drowning in a sea of unreality.

May becomes is becomes has, I tell my clients. That is, on the first site the fact that you “may” be doing something becomes the fact that you “are” doing something by the time it has made the rounds. The next time they mention your name, they look back and add the past tense to their last assertion, whether or not it actually happened. This is recursion at work, officially sanctioned and very possible under the rules of the link economy.

When Jarvis and others breathlessly advocate for new concepts they do not understand, it is both comical and dangerous. The web gurus try to tell us that this distributed, crowdsourced version of fact-checking and research is more accurate, because it involves more people. But I side with Descartes and have more faith in a scientific approach, in which every man is responsible for his own work—in which everyone is questioning the work of everyone else, and this motivates them to be extra careful and honest.

Once this arms race has begun, things can’t just go back to normal. It escalates: A company sees how easy it is to plant stories online and hires a firm to attack its competitor. Blindsided by the bad publicity, the rival hires a firm to protect itself—and then to strike back. Thus begins an endless loop of online manipulation that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that’s the easiest of the PR battles a company may have to face.

Russia is a well-known user of this tactic as well. They call it dezinformatsiya—essentially disinformation via trolling. In the United States we call it “astroturfing”—using fake accounts or supporters to create what appear to be shows of real opinion around the internet. Another word for this is “shitposting”—whenever you see an online conversation suddenly interrupted by what seems like an unhinged person ranting about this issue or that issue. You might dismiss them, but they still managed to catch your attention for a second. This manages to fool even seemingly skeptical readers. Professor Kate Starbird at the University of Washington explained to the Seattle Times, “Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

The problem with unreality and pseudo-events is not simply that they are unreal; it is that they don’t stay unreal. While they may themselves exist in some netherworld between real and fake, the domain in which they are consumed and acted on is undoubtedly real. In being reported, these counterfeit events are laundered and passed to the public as clean bills—to buy real things. The anxiety of the media becomes the anxiety of the world, and it becomes the weakness by which the powerful are able to control and direct us.

And so fictions pass as realities. Everyone is selling and conning, and we hardly even know it. Our emotions are being triggered by simulations—unintentional or deliberate misrepresentations—of cues we’ve been taught were important. We read some story and it feels important, believing that the news is real and the principles of reporting took place, but it’s not.

It is now almost cliché for people to say, “If the news is important, it will find me.” This belief itself relies on abandoned shells. It depends on the assumption that the important news will break through the noise while the trivial will be lost. It could not be more wrong. As I discovered in my media manipulations, the information that finds us online—what spreads—is the worst kind. It raised itself above the din not through its value, importance, or accuracy but through the opposite, through slickness, titillation, and polarity.

Our knowledge and understanding is the final empty, hollow shell. What we think we know turns out to be based on nothing, or worse than nothing—misdirection and embellishment. Our facts aren’t facts; they are opinions dressed up like facts. Our opinions aren’t opinions; they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn’t information; it’s just hastily assembled symbols.

More than twenty-five years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the needs of television, then our culture’s chief mode of communicating ideas, had come to determine the very culture it was supposed to represent. The particular way that television stages the world, he wrote, becomes the model for how the world itself is to be staged.

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information? Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this. I imagine it’s because they’re afraid of the answer: There isn’t a thing we can do with it. There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction. When readers decide to start demanding quality over quantity, the economics of internet content will change. Manipulation and marketing will immediately become more difficult. My decision to spend less time online is not a selfish one, though it did make my life better. It’s voting with my wallet. If more people do the same, it will have impact.

There are three reasons at play that, when combined, create a Captain-Planet-esque superhero of shitty motives for outrage: The first reason is that the righteous indignation feels good. We live in an age of relative peace where we don’t have a “big devil” like communism or fascism to point to as the source of all our problems. They need a cause that isn’t religious since believing in things isn’t cool anymore, so finding an enemy that they feel just in hating and blaming makes them feel needed. Second, there is the money motive. It’s very lucrative to get those clicks coming to your website. Outrage is big business. And third, as cynical as I am, I can’t totally dismiss the possibility that some of these people might actually care. However, their well-intentioned idiocy is often myopic, causing more harm than good.