Trust me I'm lying

April 15,2023

last update: 2024-11-19

Blogs Make the News

• Blog mediums such as, twitter, instagram, reddit and others and their operating mediums (users) have an outsized impact on the wider society, the way it thinks and operates.
• Bigger news writers pick up signals from these mediums and decide to write articles about it.

Trading up the chain

• Ryan exploits the above format, by first baiting smaller blogs who are hungry for anything. And then sending those to bigger authors in bigger publications. Until eventually it makes the SNL or some big shot recording

The blog con

• Blogs are generally incentivized to increase their view count. this is True across youtube, instagram and others.
• This makes them more open to create content that is able to sustain its virality thereby making a lot of impressions.
• Veritasium’s video “Clickbait is unreasonably effective”. where he discusses his dilemma as a creator trying to educate people with great content vs creating content that would attract the user’s attention immediately.

Tactic 1 - The art of the bribe.

• Bloggers can be bribed into doing a lot of things.
• Because they are already looking out for it and find no conflict of interest in it.
• You can make famous actors tweet badly about themselves for as little as $35

Tactic 2 - Tell them what they want to hear

• Bloggers actually want to publish your story. Because they’re usually just playing catchup with their peers.
• Tell them what they want to hear and they’ll publish it for you. It can be a scoop about a president or anything pretty much.
• They’re desperate and they will believe whatever you say

Tactic 3 - Give ’em what spreads

• Do the heavy lifting for them. Find an angle in the story that would make it viral. Having a lot of pageviews is just a matter of being viral.

Tactic 4 - Help them trick their readers

• less than 50% of readers stay more than 1 second in a page. and that is all it takes.
• The news doesn’t even have to be true, it could also be a speculation that something might be true.
• Utilise the curiosity gap.

Tactic 5 - Sell them something they can sell

• Give them something that they will be able to sell to their readers.
• Every blogger is trying to sell something, a thought or an idea to their user. help them with it.
• Imagine it like an infinite bazaar where readers are buyers who trade their time for content. Then, every blog owner is a shopkeeper who’s trying to grab the most attention from the users. It is a fight to the bottom.

Tactic 6 - Make it all about the headline

• There are many ways, the headline has to be funny, yet curiosity inducing. Should create shock between the people
• Youtube thumbnail used to be from the 1/3, 2/3 and last part of a video. But now it can be anything. People can be tricked into watching a video without even the thumbnail having no relation to the content. eg. early days, youtube users tend to upload videos with thumbnails of women with small clothes.

Tactic 7 - Kill ’em with pageview kindness

• If you could bring pageviews to an article, help the author out so that they’re able to help you.

Tactic 8 - Use them technology against itself

• Keep iterating over the headlines and the thumbnails
• Use analytics to judge what ticks people off about an article.
• It is known that the average reader only reads about 800 words of content

Tactic 9 - Just make stuff up

• In today’s fast economy we don’t have to validate anything, we can just make random stuff up.
• Services like HARO are there, where people are able to source just about anything.
• There is a huge amount of confirmation bias going on with journalists

Irin carmon, The Daily show and Me

• Blogs generally take words out of context and try to twist them out.
• There are many scandals which were just something, that a blogger took out of context and twisted it around.
• Irin Carmon, daily show and ryan all faced something similar

There are others

• Ryan is not the only guy who’s doing media manipulations.
• There are definitely others who are definitely better than him.

Slacktivism is not activism

• A lot of bloggers tend to raise awareness by being an activist.
• But, Ryan has a different take on this that. These bloggers are just acting like they care, but all they want is the pageviews.
• They prey on the goodwill of the user.

Just passing this along

• A lot of blogs usually summarize the content of a post by some bigger publication.
• The blogs have to do this because they have to achieve post parity with their peers. By saying that this was from another publication, the responsibility of veracity is also delegated to the original blog.
• This way, information travels from one end of the network to the other, while nobody takes responsibility for it.
• This makes it easy for people like Ryan to manipulate

Cyberwarfare

• A lot of governments are trying to influence each other through the same principles that Ryan is using.

The myth of corrections

• Blogs, generally post a nasty article which gets crazy amount of views and then give an update in another article saying that the previous one was unfounded claims. The original blog stays up and receive 10X more views than the updates
• This is called iterative journalism and d

The twenty-first-century degradation ceremony

• Papers of old had a subscription based incentive. So, they had to maintain quality. But, with the pageviews incentive nobody has to maintain quality, but gain based on notoriety and quantity.

Welcome to unreality

• Real life is mundane and boring.
• But, people want something spicy in the news everyday.
• Newspeople are just delivering that spiciness, day in and day out. Ethics and morality are out of the window in this system.
• People are just taking mundane ideas and making them unreal and riling people up.

How to read a blog

• Almost always what you’re reading on a blog is inaccurate
• If a blog references or summarizes another blog always read the original source.
• Be on the lookout for weasel words like, “We hear that…”, “Insider reports…”, “Maybe…”, “some speculate that….”, “people are of the opinion that….” and other similar ones.
• These are words that absolve the reporters from their responsibility and delegate it to an unknown third party.

The book was pretty good and for an outsider like me these are things that I’ve been speculating about, but couldn’t put my finger on. This was a great read and would definitely suggest it to people