In today’s digital age, where content creation is king, Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday serves as rubric of how manipulative the digital media landscape can be. Originally, I read this book back in 2019 in a tiny cafe in Ypsilanti MI, during my year of reading, but in the last four years, its insights have only become more relevant. As we’ve witnessed media manipulation intensify with the rise of algorithms and polarized content, the book’s warnings feel more timely than ever.
Key Insights from Trust Me, I’m Lying
1. Feeding the Monster: The Pressure of Clicks
Holiday’s first major point is about the economic pressures on bloggers and content creators. With revenue driven by views, quality takes a back seat to quantity. In a world where a single click might be worth just a penny, bloggers are pushed to publish rapidly and repeatedly. This speed-over-quality approach encourages sensationalism, clickbait, and, often, misinformation.
Tactic: Exploit bloggers’ need for speed by giving them stories that require minimal verification. Many simply regurgitate press releases for SEO points, crafting headlines that tell audiences exactly what they want to hear. It’s about crafting narratives that sound believable, not necessarily those grounded in fact.
2. The Power of Emotion
There is the power of what Deleuze called Libidinal Economics and one of Holiday’s more disturbing insights is how media uses emotion to drive engagement. Anger, outrage, and shock are powerful tools. A story that riles people up is more likely to get shared, commented on, and clicked again and again.
Example: Take “ruin porn” – pictures of decayed urban landscapes. A ruin without people appears mysterious or tragic, while adding a person might invoke sadness. Emotions are carefully curated in media images to stir up reactions, with sad or despairing content used sparingly, as it doesn’t encourage sharing as much as anger or outrage.
3. The Click Economy: Where Truth Comes Second
With RSS readers fading away and social media becoming the dominant form of content delivery, the click economy has fundamentally reshaped online media. Readers aren’t subscribing; they’re clicking, and the loudest, most extreme voices win. Each click is money in the bank for bloggers, so the more exaggerated, the better.
Result: A “post now, fact-check later” approach prevails, where falsehoods can circulate widely before corrections trickle in. Corrections rarely get the same visibility, meaning initial falsehoods are often what people remember and believe.
4. Fabricated Virality
In the new media economy, stories aren’t reported, they’re engineered. Viral content is crafted through a process Holiday calls “iterative journalism.” One article builds upon the assumptions of another, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where unverified claims in one piece justify bolder claims in the next. Combine that with the money production that comes with SEO, then boom, search fabricated reality.
Consequence: Misinformation isn’t just a possibility; it’s a business model. Bloggers use phrases like “we’re hearing” or “rumors suggest” to plant ideas in readers’ minds, without taking responsibility for verifying them.
5. The Illusion of Authenticity
Holiday exposes how the “link economy” creates the appearance of credibility. A simple blue link can lend a blog post an air of legitimacy, even if it links back to another flimsy article. This cycle of linking within media networks fosters an illusion of authenticity, not actual verification.
• The RSS Shift: With fewer RSS readers to maintain quality control, content is constantly screaming for attention, becoming louder and more desperate in tone. This has turned digital media into an environment where the boldest, most eye-catching headline often wins, regardless of its accuracy.
6. Pseudo-News and “Experience Technology”
Blogs today serve up pseudo-news, snippets designed to satisfy surface curiosity without encouraging critical thought. Readers who claim, “I read somewhere that…” often only skimmed a sensationalized blog headline. In a world of instant gratification, blogs use fancy layouts and sophisticated wording to give credibility to hollow stories.
Final Thoughts
Trust Me, I’m Lying is an essential read for anyone who consumes media, especially online. Holiday’s work serves as a stark warning of how easily we are manipulated by content designed not to inform but to exploit. The book is both eye-opening and somewhat chilling, as it reveals the inner workings of a media machine built on emotional manipulation and economic incentives.
Looking back, what I read in 2019 feels even more critical now. The past few years have underscored just how embedded these tactics have become in our digital spaces. As we navigate this media landscape, it’s clear: in the age of digital media, skepticism is a survival skill.
UPDATED ADDENDUM: 11/12/2024 Wei here, the conservatives have fully taken advantage of everything here, and with the help of accessible AI, this harmful economic power has succeeded in influencing the country through the election.
Highlights
Citation (APA): Holiday, R. (2019). Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
IX Tactic #6: Make it all About the Headline
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powerhouse TheAtlantic.com, blog headlines are “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.” Readers and revenue depend on the headline’s ability to win this fight.
X Tactic #7: Kill ‘em with Pageview Kindness
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except “Is what I am making any good?”
XV Cute but Evil: Online Entertainment Tactics That Drug You And Me
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The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or 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.
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That’s what web culture does to you. 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:
XVI The Link Economy: The Leveraged Illusion of Sourcing
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But there weren’t two sides; there was simply the truth and an untruth.
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To borrow a term from computer science, the link economy is recursive—blogs pull from the blogs that came before them to create new content. Think of how a mash-up video relies on other clips to make something new, or how Twitter users retweet messages from other members and add to them.
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The link economy is designed to confirm and support, not to question or correct.
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Scientists, she says, replicate each other’s experiments in order to prove or disprove their findings. Conversely, journalists replicate one another’s conclusions and build on top of them—often when they are not correct.
XVIII The Iterative Hustle: Online Journalism’s Bogus Philosophy
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blogs duck behind qualifiers: “We’re hearing …”; “I wonder …”; “Possibly …”; “Lots of buzz that …”; “Sites are reporting …”; “Could…, Would…, Should …”; and so on. In other words, they toss the news narrative into the stream without taking full ownership and pretend to be an impartial observer of a process they began.
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Software as beta means the risk of small glitches; the news as beta means the risk of a false reality.
XIX The Myth of Corrections
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Bloggers are no more eager to seek out feedback that shows they were wrong than anyone else is. And they are understandably reluctant to admit their mistakes publicly, as bloggers must do. The bigger the fuckup, the less likely people want to cop to it. It’s called “cognitive dissonance.” We’ve known about it for a while.
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Those who saw the correction were, in fact, more likely to believe the initial claim than those who did not. And they held this belief more confidently than their peers. In other words, corrections not only don’t fix the error—they backfire and make misperception worse.
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Psychologists call this cognitive rigidity. The facts that built an original premise are gone, but the conclusion remains—the general feeling of our opinion floats over the collapsed foundation that established it.
XXI The Dark Side of Snark: When Internet Humor Attacks
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To be called a douche is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society deigns to hate but can’t define. It’s a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons. It says, You are a fool, and everyone thinks it. It is the ultimate insult, because it deprives the recipient of the credentials of being taken seriously.
XXII The 21st-Century Degradation Ceremony: Blogs as Machines of Hatred and Punishment
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There is nothing to be learned from the tragic rise and fall of public men that we see on blogs. That is not their function. Their degradation is mere spectacle that blogs use to sublimate the general anxieties of their readers. To make us feel better by hurting others. To stress that the people we’re reading about are freaks, while we are normal.
XXIII Welcome to Unreality
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But we seem to think that the news is informing us! The Internet is what technologists call an “experience technology.” The more it is used, the more trust users have in it. The longer a user engages with it, the more comfortable they get and the more they believe in the world it creates.
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If fake news simply deceived, that would be one thing. 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.
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That world is exactly what we have now. It’s a world where, in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney leaked bogus information to an attention-hungry reporter for the New York Times, and then mentioned his own leak on Meet the Press to help convince us to invade Iraq.2 “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning, and I want to attribute the Times,” Cheney said, citing himself, using something he had planted in the press as proof that untrue information was now “public” and accepted fact. He used his own pseudo-event to create pseudo-news.
XXIV How to Read a Blog: An Update on Account of all the Lies
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When you hear a friend say in conversation “I was reading that …” know that today the sad fact is that they probably just glanced at something on a blog.
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Bloggers use these “substance words” (like Wikipedia’s weasel words) to give status to their flimsy stories. They use the language of Woodward and Bernstein but apply it to a media world that would make even Hearst queasy. They us what George W. S. Trow called “abandoned shells.”
Conclusion: So…Where to From Here?
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Entertainment powered television, and so everything that television touched—from war to politics to art—would inevitably be turned into entertainment. TV had to create a fake world to fit its needs, and we, the audience, watched that fake world on TV, imitated it, and it became the new reality in which we lived. The dominant cultural medium, Postman understood, determines culture itself.
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You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If, as a culture, we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.
Book Recommendations
1. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
2. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
3. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
4. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Noble
5. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigggg