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

by Ryan Holiday

bloggers at Forbes.com or the Chicago Tribune do not operate on the same editorial guidelines as their print counterparts. However, their final output can be made to look like it carries the same weight.

In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest.

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. Online games and apps operate on the same principles and exploit the same impulses: Be consuming without frustrating, manipulative without revealing the strings.

I’d serve ads in direct violation of the standards of publishers and ad networks, knowing that while they’d inevitably be pulled, the ads would generate all sorts of brand awareness in the few minutes users saw them. A slight slap on the wrist or pissing off some prudes was a penalty well worth paying for, for all the attention and money we got.

“Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized.” Instead of being ashamed of its crappy television journalism, CNBC was able to make extra money from the millions of views it generated.

Of all the political and financial narratives we needed in 2009, this was surely not it. Reasoned critiques of leveraged capitalism, solutions that required sacrifice—these were things that did not yield exciting blog posts or spread well online. But the Santelli clip did. CNBC fell ass first into the perfect storm of what spreads on the web—humiliation, conspiracy theories, anger, frustration, humor, passion, and possibly the interplay of several or all of these things together.

Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, “In 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.”

the public is misinformed about a situation that we desperately need to solve. Through the selective mechanism of what spreads—and gets traffic and pageviews—we get suppression not by omission but by transmission.

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 e-mail 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 e-mail: 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.” This is how it is everywhere. It might take as many as ten pageviews to leave a comment on a blog the first time. Or when you see a mistake in an article and fill out the Send Corrections form? Well, first they’ll need your e-mail address, and then they ask if you want to receive daily e-mails from them.* When you do this, you are the sucker. The site doesn’t care about your opinion; they care that, by eliciting it, they score free pageviews. Of course, this kind of manipulation is not new—it is endemic to all kinds of media.

Blogs don’t care about the issues they are provoking outrage about, and social networks don’t care what people are being social about—they care about what it means for them, how much traffic and time on site it generates. I remember reading a video games blog post of all the reasons why someone should buy the new PlayStation console over the new Xbox. It got like 500,000 views. Then the same blogger turned around and wrote about all the reasons to buy the Xbox over the PlayStation. It also got 500,000 views. There were plenty of comments and shares on both. 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 the attention.

A subscription model—whether it’s music or news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution. Opposing views can now be included. Uncertainty can be acknowledged. Humanity can be allowed. Since articles don’t have to spread on their own, but rather as part of the unit (the whole newspaper or album or collection), publishers do not need to exploit valence to drive single-use buyers.

For most of the last century, the majority of journalism and entertainment was sold by subscription (the third phase). It is now sold again online à la carte—as a one-off. Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others, be it in Google News, on Twitter, or on your Facebook wall. This One-Off Problem is exactly like the one faced by the yellow press a century or more ago, and it distorts today’s news just as it did then—only now it’s amplified by millions of blogs instead of a few hundred newspapers.

There is this naive belief that readers have: If news is important, I’ll hear about it. I would argue the opposite—it’s mostly the least important news that will find you. It’s the extreme stuff that cuts through the noise. It’s the boring information, the secret stuff that people don’t want you to know, that you’ll miss. That’s the stuff you have to subscribe to, that you pay for, that you have to chase. 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. Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it. Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh. Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened.

Reporters don’t have time for follow-ups or reasoned critiques, only quick hits. Blogs are all chasing the same types of stories, the mass media chase blogs, and the readers are following both of them—and everyone is led astray.

When the blogger Andrew Sullivan switched his site to a subscription model a few years ago, his analysis of the situation was striking. He called subscription the “purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews . . . just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.” Way too many outlets are led into temptation. It’s good for business and it’s fun.

Outside of the subscription model, headlines are intended not to represent the contents of articles but to sell them—to

On a blog, every page is the front page. It’s no wonder that the headlines of the yellow press and the headlines of blogs run to such extremes. It is a desperate fight. Life or death. And what are the consequences? You’re not a subscriber. You can’t take your click back.

(And remember, if you share the article in exasperation or even sheer disgust to a friend to show them how bad it is, you’re actually helping the outlet!)

It should be clear what types of headlines blogs are interested in. It’s not pretty, but if that’s what they want, give it to them. You don’t really have a choice. They aren’t going to write about you, your clients, or your story unless it can be turned into a headline that will drive traffic.

if the story is “Person You’ve Never Heard Of Does Something Not That Interesting,” no site is going to bite. Instead, the click-friendly, share-provoking headline has to be so obvious and enticing that there is no way they can pass it up. Hell, make them tone it down. They’ll be so happy to have the headline that they won’t bother to check whether it’s true or not. Their job is to think about the headline above all else. The medium and their bosses force them to. So that’s where you make the sale. Only the reader gets stuck with the buyer’s remorse.

For some blog empires, the content-creation process is now a pageview-centric checklist that asks writers to think of everything except “Is what I am making any good?” AOL is one of these organizations, as it emphatically (and embarrassingly) outlined in a memo titled “The AOL Way.” If writers and editors want to post something on the AOL platform, they must ask themselves: How many pageviews will this content generate? Is this story SEO-winning for in-demand terms? How can we modify it to include more terms? Can we bring in contributors with their own followers? What CPM will this content earn? How much will this content cost to produce? How long will it take to produce?1 And other such stupid questions.

Why do you think the Huffington Post once ran a front-page story about what time the Super Bowl would start? The query was a popular one on game day, and the post generated incredible amounts of traffic. It may have been a pointless story for a political and news blog like the Huffington Post to write, but the algorithm justified it—along

. In a sane system, a political article that generated thousands of comments would be an indicator that something went wrong. It means the conversation descended into an unproductive debate about abortion or immigration, or devolved into mere complaining. But in the broken world of the web, it is the mark of a professional. A blog like the Huffington Post is not going to pay for something that is met with silence, even the good kind. They’re certainly not going to promote it or display it on the front page, since it would reduce the opportunity to generate pageviews. The Huffington Post does not wish to be the definitive account of a story or inform people—since the reaction to that is simple satisfaction. Blogs deliberately do not want to help.

I don’t know if blogs enjoy being tricked. All I know is that they don’t care enough to put a stop to it. The response to sketchy anonymous tips, in my experience, is “Thanks,” a lot more often than “Prove you’re legit.”

Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse.

The pressure to keep content visually appealing and ready for impulse readers is a constant suppressant on length, regardless of what is cut to make it happen. In a University of Kentucky study of blogs about cancer, researchers found that a full 80 percent of the blog posts they analyzed contained fewer than five hundred words.3 The average number of words per post was 335, short enough to make the articles on the Huffington Post seem like lengthy manuscripts. I don’t care what Nick Denton says; I’m pretty sure that the complexities of cancer can’t be properly expressed in 100 words. Or 200, or 335, or 500, for that matter.

The bounce rate on blogs (or the percentage of people who leave the site immediately, without clicking anything) is incredibly high. Analysis of news sites has the average bounce rate pushing well north of 50 percent. When the statistics show a medium to be so fickle that half the audience starts leaving as soon as they get there, there is no question that this dynamic is going to seriously impact content choices.

Fuller’s advice does not have a wide following online, particularly his reminder that reporters owe a “duty to reality, not to platforms.” In fact, bloggers believe the opposite. And that sucks for everyone—except marketers. Because once you understand the limitations of the platform, the constraints can be used against the people who depend on it. The technology can be turned on itself.

Publicists love to promise blogs the exclusive on an announcement. The plural there is not an accident. You can give the same made-up exclusive to multiple blogs, and they’ll fall all over themselves to publish first. Throw in an arbitrary deadline, like “We’re going live with this on our website first thing in the morning,” and even the biggest blogs will forget fact-checking and make bold pronouncements on your behalf. Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do. Since you know how hard they’re looking, it’s easy to leave crumbs, fragments, or stray gems that you know will be impossible for them to resist picking up and turning into full-fledged stories. Small news is made to look like big news. Nonexistent news is puffed up and made into news. The result is stories that look just like their legitimate counterparts, only their premise is wrong and says nothing. Such stories hook with false pretenses, analyze false subjects, and inform falsely.

media is now even more dependent on others to do their research and work for them. Nowhere is this sad state of affairs more obvious than in current science reporting. Although scientific journals remain restrained by the practices and ethics of science, university websites and publicists are not. Nearly every day some minor finding is touted as an enormous breakthrough in a press release that goes out to reporters. These bloggers simply looking for traffic are never going to question the headline; they’re not even going to read the paper—they’re just in it for the headlines.

One brave journalist recently stood up to this practice and showed how bad things were. He orchestrated a study that collected loads of random data and then, finding simply a correlation between dieting and eating chocolate, created a fake institute to announce his monumental but absurdly unscientific findings: You can lose weight by eating chocolate! And bam, everyone from the Huffington Post to the Daily Mail was cheering the news. Of course you can’t seriously lose weight that way. The institute didn’t exist. The science was junk. The whole thing was a prank. Yet millions of people were given this fake news.

Set up your own think tank. Call it the Millennial Entrepreneurs Foundation and put out “research” that really just makes companies think they need to hire you as a consultant. Don’t think climate change is real? Have a business interest in making people think it isn’t? Fund “studies” that confirm what you want and then blast the internet with them. Want to invent some ridiculous new trend? Hire experts to say it’s correlated with higher sex drive or that it’s all the rage with celebrities. Sadly, no one is going to question you.

Fictive interpolation on one site becomes the source for fictive interpolation on another, and again in turn for another, until the origins are eventually forgotten. To paraphrase Charles Horton Cooley, the products of our imagination become the solid facts of society. It’s a process that happens not horizontally but vertically, moving each time to a more reputable site and seeming more real at each level. And so, in Edwards’s case, American Apparel was forced to deal with a constant stream of controversy born of one man’s uncanny ability to create an angle where there wasn’t one. And Edwards is now a top editor at Business Insider. He even wrote about this book when it came out—and made a ten-page slideshow attacking it so he could get ten times as many pageviews as he would have with an actual article.

There are fatal flaws in the blogging medium that create opportunities for influence over the media—and, ultimately, culture itself.

Unequivocally no (and remember, most headlines with questions in them can be answered that way).

Better than anyone, Breitbart understood that the media doesn’t mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.

O’Keefe learned from Breitbart that in the blogging market there is a profound shortage of investigative material or original reporting. It’s just too expensive to produce. So rather than bear those costs, O’Keefe’s stories are hollow shells—an edited clip, a faux investigation—that blogs can use as a substitute for the real thing. Then he watches as the media falls over itself to propagate it as quickly as possible. Short, shocking narratives with a reusable sound bite are all it takes.

Being caught as a manipulator can only help make you more famous.

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.

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.

The only way to beat them is by controlling your reaction and letting them embarrass themselves, as they inevitably will.

you can see what masterful music Breitbart and O’Keefe are able to play on the instruments of online media. When they sit down to publish on their blogs, they are not simply political extremists but ruthless seekers of attention. From this attention comes fame and profit—a platform for bestselling books, lucrative speaking and consulting gigs, donations, and millions of dollars in online advertising revenue. Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out. It’s by beating them at their own game. And sooner is better—because every day we wait there is more collateral damage.

More recently we’ve seen a rise in publications that specialize in almost outright propaganda—actual fake news. Sites like Denver Guardian, InfoWars, National Report, 70 News, The Political Insider, and Ending the Fed. Headlines like FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE. WIKILEAKS CONFIRMS HILLARY SOLD WEAPONS TO ISIS . . . THEN DROPS ANOTHER BOMBSHELL! BREAKING: FOX NEWS EXPOSES TRAITOR MEGYN KELLY, KICKS HER OUT FOR BACKING HILLARY. These are not real publications and the claims in those headlines are not true. But that’s precisely the point. They feel true. People share and spread them for the same reasons that, deep down, motivate you to share most of the articles you share on Facebook or Twitter, as Ricky Van Veen pointed out in his excellent TEDx talk: They confirm what you want to be true and what you want to reflect your identity.

The more an article feels like it is true, the more skeptical you should be about it. If you haven’t heard of the website before, it’s probably because it’s not legitimate. Be discerning. Be cynical. Don’t let “close enough” be your standard for truth and opinion. Insist on accuracy and on getting it right.

Ever noticed those little “From Our Partners” or “From Around the Web” thumbnails and links that appear on the pages of basically every major online publisher these days, from the Huffington Post to CNN.com to Slate? If you didn’t know, those sites aren’t really “partners.” These links are not handpicked stories that the site’s editors thought worthy of referral (would anyone ever willingly link to an article from Allstate Insurance?). No, these links are part of an ad unit. The biggest providers in this space are companies like Taboola and Outbrain. The point is to trick users interested in more content into clicking on scammy ads loosely disguised as content: “People Struggling with Credit Card Debt May Be in for a Big Surprise.” “My Wife and I Tried Blue Apron: Here’s What Happened.” “10 Celebs Who Lost Their Hot Bodies.” Even as I write this, the New York Times is running their own version of one of these ads at the top of their site: “Why Irish Pubs Are a Metaphor for American Immigration” . . . sponsored by Guinness.

Sites get paid by the click and users can’t unclick, so tactics that encourage that action are all that matter at the end of the day. More important, great content publishers are far less likely to need to buy traffic than crappy publishers or scammy salespeople. It’s just people selling credit cards and mindless gossip at high margins’ need to chase the idiots who click those things.

Psychologists call this the “narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something. In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote: The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance. . . . He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed.3

“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said.

Blogs have long traded on the principle that links imply credibility.

Online links look like citations but rarely are. Through flimsy attribution, blogs are able to assert wildly fantastic claims that will spread well and drive comments. Some might be afraid to make something up outright, so the justification of “I wasn’t the first person to say this” is very appealing. It’s a way of putting the burden all on the other guy, or on the reader.