by Ryan Holiday
But of course none of that really matters because there is still that residual stain. Even in telling this story I am unintentionally hurting Toyota. I am repeating those unforgettable words in the same sentence: Toyota. Accelerator malfunction. Scandal. Which leaves Toyota asking the same question that wrongly disgraced former U.S. secretary of labor Ray Donovan asked the court when he was acquitted of false charges that ruined his career: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”
WHERE THERE IS SMOKE THERE IS FIRE
The real trick in this game is to repeat something enough times that it begins to sound true. One of the things I noticed during the 2016 election was anytime I said something negative about Trump, I would suddenly get hit with tweets from accounts with no followers. By that I mean literally zero followers. How hard is it to get one friend?
Hard when you’re a fake account. Increasingly, smart media manipulators have realized that one way to make things seem real is by straight up gaslighting. Political campaigns, CEOs, and foreign governments can pay to create accounts that bombard influencers like journalists with information. Say something negative about Trump, and you’ll hear from what look like legitimate Trump supporters who try to intimidate you. Write something about a company, and watch as the comments section fills up with barely literate praise.
Russia is a well-known user of this tactic as well. They call it dezinformatsiya— essentially disinformation via trolling. In the United States we call it “astroturfing”—using fake accounts or supporters to create what appear to be shows of real opinion around the internet. Another word for this is “shitposting”—whenever you see an online conversation suddenly interrupted by what seems like an unhinged person ranting about this issue or that issue. You might dismiss them, but they still managed to catch your attention for a second.
This manages to fool even seemingly skeptical readers. Professor Kate Starbird at the University of Washington explained to the Seattle Times, “Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’ ” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”
You can see why these strategies would work if done on a large scale. If you were a reporter and saw that a petition had sixty thousand signatures, would you bother to investigate where those signatures came from? If you were an editor and you suddenly got fifteen e-mails pointing you to the same link, might you pass it along to a writer to cover? If you were a public figure and you kept getting tweets about something, maybe you’d reply and ask, “Has anyone heard about this?” and even in questioning it you’ve helped push that fake idea along.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. During the election, it was found that both candidates had large numbers of fake followers on Twitter. It was also revealed that one of the very wealthy founders of Oculus Rift had put money behind a group dedicated to shitposting anti-Hillary memes. When caught, he would tell the Daily Beast, “You can’t fight the American elite without serious firepower. They will outspend you and destroy you by any and all means.”
WEAPONIZING INFORMATION
Let me tell you about another unbelievable media event that happened over a meal. I wasn’t at this one but apparently Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed, was. It was hosted by Uber at the Waverly Inn in New York City. At the dinner, Uber executive Emil Michael spoke candidly about the company’s plans to deal with the unfair and biased media coverage it believed it was receiving. Smith, a guest at the event, recounted what he heard the next day:
Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press—they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.
He even named specific journalists and editors he would want to go after. This was alarming to many in the media because of how closely it came on the heels of a leaked internal report from Uber about its plans to “weaponize facts” in its fight against the taxi industry.
Not only can the media be a tool to attack others, but it can also itself attack people and be attacked in turn.
We are starting to see this in politics—little events here or there that the conspiratorially minded might suspect had deeper backing than it appeared. The 2008 election was nearly derailed when the same “citizen reporter,” on separate occasions, tricked both Obama and a campaigning Bill Clinton into saying something vulnerable and honest by misrepresenting herself. The sixty-one-year-old woman later admitted that the two figures had “had no idea [she] was a journalist,” nor that she was recording them with a hidden device. Then, angered by the lack of compensation from the Huffington Post for her “scoops,” she resigned by publishing private e-mails between herself and Arianna Huffington—just to get one last blast of attention at someone else’s expense. Anyone can write for the Huffington Post, which means anyone could potentially have the same impact. One blog, one recorder, and bam.
Even Trump himself was badly damaged when a clip of him recorded without his knowledge a decade earlier was leaked to the media. It’s also interesting to see how hard he was hit by the so-called Trump dossier, which made all sorts of sensational allegations about Trump’s dealings in Russia, purportedly based on high-level intelligence sources and research.
Who was originally responsible for funding and creating this report? The answer is almost too good to be true. The report was funded first by Republicans who sought to keep Trump from getting the party’s nomination and then by Clinton’s supporters trying to beat him in the general election. In other words, it was partisan-funded opposition research. And who ran it, despite admitting they were unable to verify its content? BuzzFeed! That’s right—the very same site who scored headlines by revealing exactly how malicious organizations might undermine and attack their enemies by doing opposition research and weaponizing it.
Without irony, Ben Smith defended the decision to run the report by saying, “The instinct to suppress news of this significance is precisely the wrong one for journalism in 2017.” But here’s the thing—it’s only significant news if it is true! How can any person prepare for or defend themselves against scandal or innuendo when the media have utterly abdicated their role in vetting the information they publish?
Whether the United States and its elections were interfered with by the Russians I cannot say—but it is pretty obvious how they could have been. The media has admitted they’re open for business and will take even the most suspect information. Apparently the only validation needed—as BuzzFeed showed with their publication of the Trump dossier—is that there is already significant chatter about something online. (And we know how easy that is to fake.)
I’ll give you one last example of how information can be weaponized, and it’s one from personal experience. A few years ago, a friend was screwed over by a famous talent agent (with a legendarily bad temper and a reputation for screwing people over). His chances of actually beating such an opponent in court were slim—he didn’t have the resources. So we worked through how he could have a lawyer draft a letter announcing his intention to file a lawsuit, which he could then leak to gossip blogs after sending it to the agent. He didn’t need to file an actual lawsuit, mind you; in such a small industry, simply the public airing of the claims—that someone had stolen someone else’s work project like that—through an intention letter and the subsequent media coverage (on TMZ, ESPN, and a host of other blogs) was its own form of leverage.
I ran into the friend later and learned the outcome of the tactic: The agency paid him $500,000 and admitted defeat. I think about this often. That agent might have screwed my friend over, but how easily could this tactic used in response be abused, used against an innocent party? What strikes me is not that it was some elaborate, orchestrated con—I don’t feel l
ike I discovered some criminal instinct inside myself either—it’s that the tools were so accessible and easy to use, it was almost difficult not to do so. In fact, it came so effortlessly that I didn’t even remember doing it until he reminded me.
The way someone can be exploited through both the legal and political systems (anyone can be sued for anything and anyone can be accused of anything) and the media, when they cover it (claiming libel of a public figure generally requires malicious intent or reckless disregard of the truth), reminds me of the gruesome accident in Meet Joe Black in which Brad Pitt’s character is hit by a car, tossed up in the air, and hit by another car going in the other direction.
To not be petrified of a shakedown, a malicious lie, or an unscrupulous rival planting stories is to be unimportant. You only have nothing to fear if you’re a nobody. And even then, well, who knows?
*I heard an even more anguished version of this cry from the family of a celebrity who contacted me after their son’s death. They wanted help with Wikipedia users who were inserting speculative and untrue information about his tragic accident.
*Before he ran for president, then-senator Barack Obama advised his fellow politicians about the burgeoning political blogosphere: “If you take these blogs seriously, they’ll take you seriously.” As long as we can all admit that we have to assuage bloggers’ egos in order to be treated fairly. . . . means to demand protection from a threat that you create. Many blogs employ it subtly, extorting through a combination of a sense of entitlement and laziness. A mostly positive 2010 Financial Times article about the rising influence of blogs covering the luxury watch market featured a small complaint from a watch manufacturer about a blogger who often got important details and product specifications wrong, in addition to having typos and bad grammar. In response, the editor of another watch-industry blog, TheWatch-Lounge, leaped to the site’s defense: “What is the luxury watch industry doing to help him become a better writer?” he demanded to know. “And for that matter what is the industry doing to help any of these bloggers become better writers?”3
*In his book The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson, a journalist, suggests that the real way to get away with “wielding true, malevolent power” is to be boring. Why? Journalists love writing about eccentrics and hate writing about dull or boring people—because it’s boring.
*Eater is now owned by Vox Media.
XVIII
THE MYTH OF COR RECTIONS
Our web folks will ask, “Can’t we post it and say we’re checking it?” The feeling nowadays is, “We don’t make mistakes, we just make updates.”
—ROXANNE ROBERTS, WASHINGTON POST RELIABLE SOURCES COLUMNIST
You end up chasing Tweets that spread faster than you can keep up; it’s like putting toothpaste back in the tube, except the toothpaste is alive and didn’t like it in the tube and is dreaming of Broadway.
—TOM PHILLIPS, INTERNATIONAL EDITOR OF MSN, CREATOR OF IS TWITTER WRONG?
Is it not obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by this wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes.
—UPTON SINCLAIR, THE BRASS CHECK
ITERATIVE JOURNALISM IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF A belief in the web’s ability to make corrections and updates to news stories. While fans of iterative journalism acknowledge that increased speed may lead to mistakes, they say it’s okay because the errors can be fixed easily. They say that iterative journalism is individually weak but collectively strong, since the bloggers and readers are working together to improve each story—iteratively.
As someone who has both been written about as a developing story and worked with people who are written about this way all the time, I can assure you that this is bullshit. Corrections online are a joke. All of the justifications for iterative journalism are not only false—they are literally the opposite of how it works in practice.
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 are to want to cop to it. It’s called “cognitive dissonance.” We’ve known about it for a while.
Seeing something you know to be untrue presented in the news as true is exasperating. I don’t know what it feels like to be a public figure (I realize it’s hard to be sympathetic to their feelings), but I have had untruths spread about me online, and I know that it sucks. I know that as a press agent, having seen that many of these mistakes bloggers make are easily preventable, it is extra infuriating. And they feel absolutely no guilt about making them.
If you want to get a blogger to correct something—which sensitive clients painfully insist upon—be prepared to have to be an obsequious douche. You’ve got to flatter bloggers into thinking that somehow the mistake wasn’t their fault. Or be prepared to be an asshole. Sometimes the resistance is so strong, and the entitlement so baked in, that you have to risk your friendly-to-each-other’s-face relationship by calling the blogger out to their publisher boss.
Sometimes it has to get even more serious than that. One of my all-time favorite blogger correction stories involves Matt Drudge, the political blogger sainted in the history of blogging for breaking the Monica Lewinsky story. But few people remember the big political “scandal” Drudge broke before that one. Based on an unnamed source, Drudge accused prominent journalist and Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal of a shocking history of spousal abuse—and one covered up by the White House, no less.
Except none of it was true. Turns out there was no evidence that Blumenthal had ever struck his wife, nor was there a White House cover-up. The story quickly fell apart after it became clear an anonymous Republican source had whispered into Drudge’s ear to settle a political score against Blumenthal. Drudge eventually admitted it to the Washington Post: “[S]omeone was using me to try to go after [him]. . . . I think I’ve been had.”
Yet Drudge’s posted correction on the story said only, “I am issuing a retraction of my information regarding Sidney Blumenthal that appeared in the Drudge Report on August 11, 1997.” He refused to apologize for the pain caused by his recklessness, even in the face of a $30 million libel suit. And four years later, when the ordeal finally ended, Drudge still defended iterative journalism: “The great thing about this medium I’m working in is that you can fix things fast.”1
There’s only one word for someone like that: dickhead.
And at the end of the day, will it even make a difference? The original story almost always spreads faster than the correction. Even if it didn’t, the very fact that you are trying to get a correction shows that the incorrect version already has a big head start. There’s an old saying: “A lie makes its way across lots, while the truth has to go around by the dirt road.” It’s true: Sensational mistakes have an advantage over sober, meticulous, or disappointing facts. It’d just be nice if the people whose job it is to be right for a living (reporters) would anticipate and adjust for it. (Unless that isn’t their job???)
CORRECTING PEOPLE WHO ARE WRONG FOR A LIVING
I once gave the show The Price Is Right a five-hundred-dollar American Apparel gift card to use as a prize. We thought it’d be funny, since the show is television’s longest-running guilty pleasure. (Honestly, I was just excited as a fan.) The episode aired in September and was quickly posted by one of my employees on the company’s You-Tube account. Everyone loved it and got the irony—a cool brand slumming it on a show only old people care about. Well, everyone got it except the popular advertising blog Brand Channel, which posted a nonironic piece titled “American Apparel Taps Drew Carey for Image Turnaround.”2 With excruciating obliviousness they proceeded to discuss the merits of my “surprising choice” to film a “back-to-school commercial, featuring a m
ock version of classic US game show The Price Is Right hosted by an all-
American TV personality Drew Carey.”
How does one begin to correct that? This idiot didn’t even bother to look up who the host of The Price Is Right was and figured it was easier to assume the whole thing was an elaborate hoax than to, you know, e-mail and ask why we’d appeared on the show. And what am I as the publicist supposed to do? If I had even known how to communicate to that idiot that Drew Carey was, in fact, the actual host of The Price Is Right, and that the video the blogger watched was a clip from an actual episode and not a commercial, I still would have to convince the writer to retract the entire thing, because an update couldn’t have fixed how wrong it was. Since I no longer foolishly hope for miracles, I didn’t even try to correct it, even as other blogs repeated the claims. I just had to sit there and watch as people believed something so stupid was true; the writer was wrong to the point of it actually working to their advantage.
If I’d wanted to try to get a correction, however, it would not have made much of a difference. Getting a correction posted takes time, often hours or days, occasionally weeks, because bloggers deliberately drag their feet. Posts do most of their traffic shortly after going live and being linked to. By the time your correction or update happens, there is hardly much of an audience. I recall sending e-mails to Gawker and Jezebel on several occasions over matters of factual errors and not receiving a response. Only after e-mailing again (from the same device) was I told, “Oh, I never got your e-mail.” Sure, guys, whatever you say. My anonymous tips seem to arrive in their inboxes just fine—it’s the signed corrections that run into issues.
