by Ryan Holiday
SELLING YOU TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER
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.
It’s probably not a coincidence that a good many of those links have bikini-photo thumbnails, weight-loss “success” stories, or celebrity names in the headline. 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.
If that feels a little gross, it should. When you’re on Fusion.net, thinking they care about you, in fact, they’ve done the calculation and found that it’s more profitable to send you away to another site than it is to keep you there reading more of the original content they make themselves.
Of course, not every site makes this bargain. I asked Patrick de Laive, cofounder of TheNextWeb.com, why “From Our Partners” links were conspicuously absent from his site. His reply: “The main reason why we’re not doing something like that is that we don’t see the value for our readers. It might be an okay revenue stream, but as long as there is no clear value for our readers, we don’t want to bother them with it.” But the reality is most sites do.
DRUGGED AND DELUSIONAL: THE RESULT
I remember seeing Jeff Jarvis, the blogger best known for his condescending media pontificating, at a tech conference once. He sat down next to me, ostensibly to watch and listen to the talk. Not once did he look up from his laptop. He tapped away the entire time, first on Twitter, then on Facebook, then moderating comments on his blog, and on and on, completely oblivious to the world. It struck me then that whatever I decided to do with the rest of my life, I did not want to end up like him. Because at the end of the talk, Jarvis got up and spoke during the panel’s Q&A, addressing the speakers as well as the audience. In the world of the web, why should not paying attention preclude you from getting your say?
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:
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
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. The more time kids spend online, studies show, the worse their grades are. According to a Nielsen study, active social networkers are 26 percent more likely to give their opinion on politics and current events offline, even though they are exactly the people whose opinions should matter the least.
“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kier kegaard 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.
If the users stop for even a second, they may see what is really going on. And then the business model would fall apart.
HOW TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
My son was born on November 9, 2016. The surprise of the election results had sent my wife into labor. The previous few months had been particularly unhappy ones for me. Not because there was anything wrong in my life; on the contrary, in my life things were going quite well. The source of my misery? I was caught up in the news cycle.
I told myself it was partly my job. But the reality was, I was doing less of my job. How could it have been otherwise? I’d become consumed by a divisive, contentious, scandal-driven news loop. Twitter. Google News. Apple News. Facebook. Longreads and hot takes via Instapaper. CNN. E-mail conversations. NPR.
My media diet had gone from abstemious to addicted. As we sat in the recovery room and I caught myself pulling up my Twitter account to read another article from another person who had undoubtedly been wrong about the election (as I myself embarrassingly had), I felt a wave of shame. What the hell was I doing? Here, in the hospital, in this important moment in my life, I was trying to read the news?
I’d venture to guess that there is someone else who, deep down, can at least relate to that sentiment: fellow (and admitted) news junkie, and now president, Donald Trump.
It’s time we all came to terms with our compulsion: How is anyone going to make America or themselves great again, if we’re all glued to our devices and television screens? How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you’re doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?
To think it is his morning viewing of Fox & Friends, his evening tune-in to Hannity, and his regular checking of silly conspiracy-ridden Twitter accounts that have been responsible for some of his administration’s most boneheaded and unnecessary scandals.
In the 1990s political scientists began to speak about what they called the CNN effect. The basic premise was that a world of twenty-four-hour media coverage would have considerable impact on foreign and domestic policy. When world leaders, generals, and politicians watch their actions—and the actions of their counterparts—dissected, analyzed, and speculated about in real time, the argument goes, it changes what they do
and how they do it . . . much for the worse.
When they came up with this theory, CNN was mostly a niche channel. The idea that it would soon be only a part of a vast attention-sucking ecosystem that went far beyond broadcasting twenty-four hours a day was inconceivable. Today the news machine includes not only dozens of cable channels but also millions of blogs and hundreds of millions of social media accounts—all of which operate in real time, creating billions of bits of content a second.
How can anyone make tough decisions while trying to keep abreast of this? How do they know what is real chatter and what is fake? The answer is they can’t. They just get whipped around and are as confused as everyone else.
I marked the day after the election by doing the following: I deleted Twitter from my phone. I deleted Facebook from my phone. I deleted the Google News app from my phone. I figured out how to remove Apple News from Siri. I removed CNN from my nightly scan of the television channels.
I wasn’t interested in being jerked around anymore. I didn’t need to follow every meaningless update or fall for every outrageous headline. It was preventing me from seeing the bigger pictures. Now, if only politicians and leaders could do the same. The world would be a better place.
XVI
JUST PASSING THIS ALONG
WHEN NO ONE OWNS WHAT THEY SAY
Our readers collectively know far more than we will ever know, and by responding to our posts, they quickly make our coverage more nuanced and accurate.
—HENRY BLODGET, EDITOR AND CEO OF BUSINESS INSIDER
Truths are more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation.
—DESCARTES
HEN RY BLODGET, IN A REVEALING ONSTAGE interview with reporter Andrew Sorkin, explained the increasingly common cycle like this: “There are stories that will appear on Gawker Media—huge conversations in the blogosphere—everything else. It’s passed all over. Everyone knows about it. Everybody’s clicking on it. Then, finally, an approved source speaks to the New York Times or somebody else, and the New York Times will suddenly say, ‘Okay now we can report that.’ ”
On Twitter you’ll see a common phrase in people’s bios: “Retweets ≠ endorsements,” meaning that just because they share something doesn’t mean they agree with it or know if it’s true or not. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen often jokingly tweets alongside breaking news, “Huge, if true . . .” (in reality, news is meaningless unless true). In White House press briefings and now from politicians themselves we see a version of this attitude: Statements are prefaced with “It’s being reported that” or presented as “alternative facts.” Errors are being defended with “Lots of people were saying it.” Just imagine you’re the guy whose job it is to apologize to the British ambassador because the president stupidly accused British spies of helping Barack Obama wiretap him. Just imagine actually having to say, as a White House official later told reporters, “Mr. Spicer and General McMaster both explained that [Trump] was simply pointing to public reports and not endorsing any specific story.”* I almost pitied Sean Spicer: “All we’re doing is literally reading off what other stations and people have reported. We’re not casting judgment on that.”
Apparently we live in a world where at even the highest and most sensitive level information is passed on without being vetted, where the final judgment of truth or falsity does not fall on the outlet reporting it or the person spreading it but on the readers themselves. As a TechCrunch editor described it, “With social media, there are no editors. There is no waiting for confirmation. When you tweet or re-tweet, you are not checking the facts or even so much concerned if you are spreading a lie. . . . But this is how process journalism now works. It’s journalism as beta.”
Is it any wonder, then, that we are drowning in inaccuracies and mistakes? I don’t think so.
Nearly everyone involved in media and politics is shirking their duty—and that makes them ripe for exploitation (or in the case of American Apparel and CNN, a missile that can strike your company at any time). And yet most of the social media elite want this for our future.
THE DELEGATION OF TRUST
Reporters can hardly be everywhere at once. For most of recent history, media outlets all used the same self-imposed editorial guidelines, so relying on one another’s work was natural. When a fact appeared in the Chicago Tribune, it was pretty safe for the San Francisco Chronicle to repeat that same fact, since both publications have high verification standards.
These were the old rules:
1. If the outlet is legitimate, the stories it breaks are.
2. If the story is legitimate, the facts inside it are.
3. It can be assumed that if the subject of the story is legitimate, then what people are saying about it probably is too.
These rules allow one journalist to use the facts brought forth by another, hopefully with attribution. This assumption makes researching much easier for reporters, since they can build on the work of those who came before them, instead of starting from the beginning of a story. It’s a process known as the “delegation of trust.”1
The web has its own innovation on the delegation of trust, known as “link economy.” Basically it refers to the exchange of traffic and information between blogs and websites. Say the Los Angeles Times reported that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were splitting up. Perez Hilton would link to this report on his blog and add his own thoughts. Then other blogs would link to Perez’s account and maybe the original Times source as well. This is an outgrowth from the early days of blogging, when blogs lacked the resources to do much original reporting. They relied on other outlets to break stories, which they then linked to and provided commentary on. From this came what is called the link economy, one that encouraged sites to regularly and consistently link to each other. I send you a link now, you send me a link later—we trade off doing the job of reporting.
The phrase “link economy” was popularized by Jeff Jarvis, whom you met here earlier. His credentials as a blogger, journalism professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, and author of books such as What Would Google Do? made him an early influential voice in new media. Unfortunately, he’s also an idiot, and the link economy concept he advocated has unquestionably made the media a less reliable resource than it once was.
The link economy encourages blogs to point their readers to other bloggers who are saying crazy things, to borrow from each other without verification, and to take more or less completed stories from other sites, add a layer of commentary, and turn them into something they call their own. 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.
But as the trading-up-the-chain scam makes clear, the media is no longer governed by a set of universal editorial and ethics standards. Even within publications, the burden of proof for the print version of a newspaper might differ drastically from what reporters need to go live with a blog post. As media outlets grapple with tighter deadlines and smaller staffs, many of the old standards for verification, confirmation, and fact-checking are becoming impossible to maintain. Every blog has its own editorial policy, but few disclose it to readers. The material one site pulls from another can hardly be trusted when it’s just as likely to have been written with low standards as with high ones.
The conditions on which the delegation of trust and the link economy need to operate properly no longer exist. But the habits remain and have been mixed into a potent combination. The result is often embarrassing and contagious misinformation.
A few years back a young Irish student posted a fake quotation on the Wikipedia page of composer Maurice Jarre shortly after the man died. (The obituary-friendly quote said in part, “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”) At the time, I’m not sure
the student understood the convergence of the link economy and the delegation of trust. That changed in an instant, when his fabricated quote began to appear in obituaries for the composer around the world.
It’s difficult to pinpoint where it started, but at some point, a reporter or a blogger saw that quotation and used it in an article. Eventually the quote found its way to the Guardian, and from there it may as well have been real. The quote so perfectly expressed what writers wished to say about Jarre, and the fact that it was in the Guardian, a reputable and prominent newspaper, made it the source of many links. And so it went along the chain, its origins obscured, and the more times it was repeated, the more real it felt.
This is where the link economy fails in practice. Wikipedia editors may have caught and quickly removed the student’s edit, but that didn’t automatically update the obituaries that had incorporated it. Wikipedia administrators are not able to edit stories on other people’s websites, so the quote remained in the Guardian until they caught and corrected it too. The link economy is designed to confirm and support, not to question or correct. In fact, the stunt was only discovered after the student admitted what he’d done.
“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”2
The proponents of the link economy brush aside these examples. The posts can be updated, they say; that’s the beauty of the internet. But as far as I know there is no technology that issues alerts to each trackback or every reader who has read a corrupted article, and there never will be.
