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

by Ryan Holiday

In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link seems like it will support weight. (As had the links to the Guardian story containing the false quote.) If I write in an article that “Thomas Jefferson, by his own remarks, admitted to committing acts considered felonious in the State of Virginia,” you’d want to see some evidence before you were convinced. Now imagine that I added a link to the words “acts considered felonious.” This link could go to anything—it could go to a dictionary definition of “felonious acts,” or it could go to a pdf of the entire penal code for the state of Virginia, or it could just go to a gif that when you click it says, “Ha! You shouldn’t have trusted me!” But by linking to something, I have vaguely complied with the standards of the link economy. 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.