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

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The cult classic that predicted the rise of fake news—revised and updated for the post-Trump, post-Gawker age. Hailed as "astonishing and disturbing" by the Financial Times and "essential reading" by TechCrunch at its original publication, former American Apparel marketing director Ryan Holiday’s first book sounded a prescient alarm about the dangers of fake news. It's all the more relevant today. Trust Me, I’m Lying was the first book to blow the lid off the speed and force at which rumors travel online—and get "traded up" the media ecosystem until they become real headlines and generate real responses in the real world. The culprit? Marketers and professional media manipulators, encouraged by the toxic economics of the news business. Whenever you see a malicious online rumor costs a company millions, politically motivated fake news driving elections, a product or celebrity zooming from total obscurity to viral sensation, or anonymously sourced articles becoming national conversation, someone is behind it. Often someone like Ryan Holiday. As he explains, “I wrote this book to explain how media manipulators work, how to spot their fingerprints, how to fight them, and how (if you must) to emulate their tactics. Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where trolls hijack debates, marketers help write the news, opinion masquerades as fact, algorithms drive everything to extremes, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m pulling back the curtain because it’s time the public understands how things really work. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.”

Review: The most relevant exposé of online journalism today. - The first review I saw for this book said it could be finished in an afternoon implying that it's consideration as whole need not more than a full day. That kind of casual consumption is the cancer this book fully explores. I had to put Trust Me I'm Lying down several times over the first couple of chapters. The words were so heavy, pregnant with the weight that can only come from a true exposé that I wanted time to actually digest what I was reading. At 24 I've been on the Internet for 16 years. My very first memory is of my then 13-year-old sister lying to strangers in an online chat room. Lying was a hallmark of the Internet for so long that growing up I was treated with adults constantly reminding the younger generation that, "If you've read it on the Internet, it's simply not true." Surely when companies started throwing billions of dollars at online publishing as newspaper subscriptions all but dried up there was a policy shift right? According to this book, no. At least where the author is a blogger and the blogger's full time employment comes from "writing". Ryan paints the entire online publishing industry with a wide brush, but backs up his claims not just with relevant anecdotes, quotes from prominent names, but also and more importantly the philosophy that drives these people and the business at large. As much time Ryan spent writing, manipulating, and toying with blogs I've spent reading them. Luckily the industry that concerns me didn't concern him, and I think that's where some lines needed to be drawn which Ryan doesn't actually acknowledge in his book, but it's not necessarily in his interest to do so. My review actually ends here: The Internet is full of liars. Ryan Holiday played the part for a while, discovered how easy it is to do, did it for what he amounted to believe was a good purpose, placed some bad bets, and overall decided that this isn't where online media should be today. His knack for being a very accomplished liar or "troll" as Internet syntax goes shouldn't in any way malign his message. You are being lied to, all the time, the Internet is not safer than Fox News or CNBC. In fact in many ways it's far, far worse. You shouldn't be comfortable or complicit with news this way. His reputation is actually stellar, in fact I've known him for five years and I look up to him not just for his professional acumen but for who he is as a person. He will probably have to play out his role for a few more months while his message is propagated because people like the scandal more than they ought to right now. They should be hearing the actual message, that the Internet is a dredge of corruption, and barring a huge, huge change, it will continue to be. If the messenger was a 20 something intelligent thoughtful individual that was hardworking and honest, well, he'd be boring. His book would by extension probably be boring. It's a weird, dark and twisted kind of comedy that when I Google his name the top articles are basically sleights, unfounded accusations and snarky disparagement of his name and work. If you're reading the book and stumble upon this review. You should be asking, how many of these articles, how many of these bloggers actually flew out to New Orleans and tried to write a real story? How many people sat in his living room and marveled at the sheer volume of books that one kid could possibly read, let alone understand? No, they probably realized it's just as easy to say he got this book deal, his job at American Apparel through connections, he's a liar, he's just making shit up, and everything is fine the way it is. Now. I did have some problems with the book which I will outline here. I don't think a lack of thoroughness was the problem but there were a couple of angles which Ryan doesn't consider and I'd like to point them out here. Here's an example. Holiday stumbles upon the realization that blogs absolutely love Press Releases. In my industry (computer science) this is a given. My fellow techies eat up official Press Releases because you can't lie about a chip size or a gigahertz. Watching Engaget uncover over a six month period 300 phones that are all using a certain technology is vital to how not just my company reacts, but how thousands and thousands of small and large tech companies react. Let's look at how Apple went out of it's way to create a perfect mobile browser experience in it's first generation of phones. Instead of a quiet panic to catch up, what if the industry at large focussed on text-message based communication instead? Would you still enjoy browsing the Internet on your phone if only 1 out of every 100 websites was optimized for your 3″ screen? Meanwhile all of your friends have instant communication with banks, stock trading, travel deals, and sports scores? What takes them a half second on their non-Apple Taxed phone takes you several minutes. Luckily it didn't turn out to be the case. While both were viable technologies at solving a single problem (making information available at your actual finger tip touches), but both hardware and software trended towards the mobile browser and eventually apps. How? Could media manipulation have played a part? Most assuredly not. Networks like AT&T quickly churned out 3G and then 4G networks, processors shrunk drastically, and within 36 months mobile websites found a standard and stuck to it. No amount of reality distortion from Steve Jobs or Ryan Holiday could have changed the arch that this industry followed. But while it was happening blog coverage was one of the most important facets to how quickly everything moved. All of a sudden you didn't need to spend $20,000 annually to attend tech events from around the country. Shoddy journalism might get the details wrong online, but this was easily remedied at the water cooler where discussion about what you just interpreted online happens to meet the thick high wall of reality that is a Project Manager, Sys Admin, or even your average code monkey. Some things just don't work in computing, engineers know these limits, and this is more of a blessing than a curse. Unfortunately not every industry behaves as mine. Ryan does go into depth about how real companies and extremely important events like electing a President are all shaped by standards which have set the bar so low that responsibility doesn't exist in any form. `Trust Me' talks about the immediacy problem blogs have created and how it doesn't really contribute to a better story. Publishing news online before it's vetted gives us a few minutes or maybe a day's advance notice and the majority of the problems regarding our complicit approval of information that refuses to actually inform could be solved by taking away the immediacy. But what about when immediacy is vital? Take the snipers in Libya. They were taken down by the Social Media shotgun. Whenever a crew of snipers were spotted via camera phones, they were hastily shared on Twitter and local news literally saving lives and turning the tide for the rebels, who would send in grenadiers to take out their crow's nests. Perhaps there's a story to be written as well, but that kind of social media news is clearly a new spigot of information that doesn't appear as a counterpoint in Holiday's book to show how we can be taking advantage of instant news. But the book as it's written isn't meant to be a full digest of online media at large, it's a confession tape of a media abuser so it's obvious why it's left out. I just didn't see the immediacy problem as big when it comes to Twitter, it has it's uses for news, but I thought it was understood that 140 characters isn't enough. My last critique is only that he admits to not knowing how to solve the myriad of problems facing online news at large other than confessing he repeatedly took advantage of chinks in their armor and hopes by revealing his secrets they'll be better protected. If I worked for the New York Times I'd be sending Ryan an all white stetson in appreciation instead of casually correcting a post when he pretended to be a vinyl record lover and calling it a day. I was genuinely curious as to what his solutions might be and was a little disappointed to not even see one. Could you gamify the news so that accurate, and well written coverage gets rewarded in some arbitrary but entertaining way while shoddy inaccurate news is punished? Would a paywall ostensibly solve the bloggers' problem of having to publish far too many posts for quotas? How about utilizing digital wallets and social networks to create a system where people get credit for being sources, but give the credit back when consuming articles? In that scenario you establish a record of someone's name and wall off the garden without ever actually exchanging money. Oh well, perhaps in the next one. Awesome work Ryan, it was a great read. I'm not even lying.
Review: Trading Up the Chain: Blogs, Bias, and the Dilemma of Delegated Trust - In "Trust Me, I'm Lying," Ryan Holiday pulls back the curtain to reveal what is going on behind the scenes of online “blogs." For the book, Holiday defines a blog as any online site, from single-person operations up to the New York Times, which either purports to report current news or provides commentary. Holiday discusses how easy he found it to manipulate the blogosphere and how it ultimately creates a world of unreality, which, unfortunately, does intersect with the real world enough to cause destruction to the individual lives and businesses in the news. Summary of Contents Holiday's central thesis is that the blogosphere suffers from two major and interrelated problems: The first problem is that blogs suffer from fierce competition for table scraps of revenue. Since there is so little money to be made for most in blogging, bloggers race to publish first, most sensationally, and with complete disregard for the time required to ensure even reasonable veracity of their stories. The second related problem is that blogs seem to operate on a "delegated trust" model. Holiday argues that before blogs, news media had developed editorial standards that were about the same from publication to publication. This meant that if one outlet was reporting something, others had some confidence that the first had done their due diligence regarding the story's veracity. Holiday shows that there is now a wide variety of editorial standards, including, in many cases, none, that break this model. Holiday relates numerous cases showing how he exploited the weaknesses in the blogosphere to feed false information into the monster and then "trade it up the chain." For instance, starting with the lowest level blogs, hungry for any traffic that could go viral, he could get them to publish wholly made-up "leaks" from "anonymous sources" that he says were never verified. From this, a buzz would be created on low-level blogs that he would then mention to higher-level blogs, asking, "How can you not be covering this?" Holiday claims that by using this basic method, he and others could get publications all the way up to the New York Times to report on information completely manufactured out of whole cloth. Along with relating numerous instances of garbage information entering the system at the lowest levels and percolating up to the top, Holiday examines some of the underlying social science explaining why the system is so vulnerable to manipulation. Evaluation of the Book Given the amount of misinformation out there, which only continued to explode after the publication of the revised edition in 2017, this is the kind of book that any citizen of a democracy who interacts with online media or is affected by it (a long way of saying everyone) should read. Indeed, this book is now mandatory in many journalism schools and is required reading for new employees entering the news media to help their outlet avoid being victims of these manipulations. Although this book was a highly worthwhile read, it leaned a little too heavily toward numerous case studies instead of spending time on the underlying theory for me. In the preface, Holiday makes it clear, however, that this was a deliberate choice as he wanted to write a book on this critical topic that would be read instead of an academic treatise that would be ignored. Holiday used all the techniques he learned from the blogosphere, including heavy media manipulation, to have the book reach as extensive an audience as possible. Some of this is clearly demonstrated in the organization of the book. The chapters are short. Each is further broken down into multiple short sections with very few blocks of text longer than even a couple of pages. It is all designed to be exceptionally easy to consume. Although presenting much interesting theory, for example, research on how little time viewers spend reading an article and how likely they are to immediately "bounce" from a page, the tilting toward case studies came at the expense of making the stories repetitive after a while. I often read a story and wondered what new principle it was trying to establish versus what had already been established by previous stories. The second significant weakness of the book is that although it does delve somewhat into politics, it could have gone much deeper into underlying theories, such as "my side bias," of why people are so prone to political bias and how the media seems just as affected by these biases or, perhaps, even more so, than everyone else. Although the book's conclusion is already bleak, Holiday underestimated just how extreme political polarization would become, a situation that events since 2020, especially, have laid bare. In addition to these two weaknesses, it was unclear how everything described comes together in some cases. For example, Holiday mentions that there are a number of low readership blogs that are read by some very important people and thus have influence far beyond what their reader count would suggest. At the same time, Holiday says that since these blogs are tiny and do not get much traffic, they are easily manipulated by manipulations offering them more traffic. This claim did not make much sense to me. First, how does Holiday know where these low-traffic but influential blogs are? Second, it seems that the only way that important, and presumably at least somewhat intelligent, people would pay attention is if they were publishing high-quality content, as opposed to any junk that would generate traffic. Conclusion Despite the weaknesses mentioned, I understand that the book was written the way it was for a reason: to make it as accessible as possible. Given that many feel, looking back at historical examples, that online misinformation is following a pattern that has a high chance of becoming a risk to American democracy, this book provides an excellent look behind the scenes at how the online misinformation sausage is made.

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| Specification | Value |
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| Best Sellers Rank | #74,575 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #2 in Blogging & Blogs #5 in Public Relations (Books) #8 in Social Media for Business |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 2,244 Reviews |

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The most relevant exposé of online journalism today.
*by A***R on August 31, 2012*

The first review I saw for this book said it could be finished in an afternoon implying that it's consideration as whole need not more than a full day. That kind of casual consumption is the cancer this book fully explores. I had to put Trust Me I'm Lying down several times over the first couple of chapters. The words were so heavy, pregnant with the weight that can only come from a true exposé that I wanted time to actually digest what I was reading. At 24 I've been on the Internet for 16 years. My very first memory is of my then 13-year-old sister lying to strangers in an online chat room. Lying was a hallmark of the Internet for so long that growing up I was treated with adults constantly reminding the younger generation that, "If you've read it on the Internet, it's simply not true." Surely when companies started throwing billions of dollars at online publishing as newspaper subscriptions all but dried up there was a policy shift right? According to this book, no. At least where the author is a blogger and the blogger's full time employment comes from "writing". Ryan paints the entire online publishing industry with a wide brush, but backs up his claims not just with relevant anecdotes, quotes from prominent names, but also and more importantly the philosophy that drives these people and the business at large. As much time Ryan spent writing, manipulating, and toying with blogs I've spent reading them. Luckily the industry that concerns me didn't concern him, and I think that's where some lines needed to be drawn which Ryan doesn't actually acknowledge in his book, but it's not necessarily in his interest to do so. My review actually ends here: The Internet is full of liars. Ryan Holiday played the part for a while, discovered how easy it is to do, did it for what he amounted to believe was a good purpose, placed some bad bets, and overall decided that this isn't where online media should be today. His knack for being a very accomplished liar or "troll" as Internet syntax goes shouldn't in any way malign his message. You are being lied to, all the time, the Internet is not safer than Fox News or CNBC. In fact in many ways it's far, far worse. You shouldn't be comfortable or complicit with news this way. His reputation is actually stellar, in fact I've known him for five years and I look up to him not just for his professional acumen but for who he is as a person. He will probably have to play out his role for a few more months while his message is propagated because people like the scandal more than they ought to right now. They should be hearing the actual message, that the Internet is a dredge of corruption, and barring a huge, huge change, it will continue to be. If the messenger was a 20 something intelligent thoughtful individual that was hardworking and honest, well, he'd be boring. His book would by extension probably be boring. It's a weird, dark and twisted kind of comedy that when I Google his name the top articles are basically sleights, unfounded accusations and snarky disparagement of his name and work. If you're reading the book and stumble upon this review. You should be asking, how many of these articles, how many of these bloggers actually flew out to New Orleans and tried to write a real story? How many people sat in his living room and marveled at the sheer volume of books that one kid could possibly read, let alone understand? No, they probably realized it's just as easy to say he got this book deal, his job at American Apparel through connections, he's a liar, he's just making shit up, and everything is fine the way it is. Now. I did have some problems with the book which I will outline here. I don't think a lack of thoroughness was the problem but there were a couple of angles which Ryan doesn't consider and I'd like to point them out here. Here's an example. Holiday stumbles upon the realization that blogs absolutely love Press Releases. In my industry (computer science) this is a given. My fellow techies eat up official Press Releases because you can't lie about a chip size or a gigahertz. Watching Engaget uncover over a six month period 300 phones that are all using a certain technology is vital to how not just my company reacts, but how thousands and thousands of small and large tech companies react. Let's look at how Apple went out of it's way to create a perfect mobile browser experience in it's first generation of phones. Instead of a quiet panic to catch up, what if the industry at large focussed on text-message based communication instead? Would you still enjoy browsing the Internet on your phone if only 1 out of every 100 websites was optimized for your 3″ screen? Meanwhile all of your friends have instant communication with banks, stock trading, travel deals, and sports scores? What takes them a half second on their non-Apple Taxed phone takes you several minutes. Luckily it didn't turn out to be the case. While both were viable technologies at solving a single problem (making information available at your actual finger tip touches), but both hardware and software trended towards the mobile browser and eventually apps. How? Could media manipulation have played a part? Most assuredly not. Networks like AT&T quickly churned out 3G and then 4G networks, processors shrunk drastically, and within 36 months mobile websites found a standard and stuck to it. No amount of reality distortion from Steve Jobs or Ryan Holiday could have changed the arch that this industry followed. But while it was happening blog coverage was one of the most important facets to how quickly everything moved. All of a sudden you didn't need to spend $20,000 annually to attend tech events from around the country. Shoddy journalism might get the details wrong online, but this was easily remedied at the water cooler where discussion about what you just interpreted online happens to meet the thick high wall of reality that is a Project Manager, Sys Admin, or even your average code monkey. Some things just don't work in computing, engineers know these limits, and this is more of a blessing than a curse. Unfortunately not every industry behaves as mine. Ryan does go into depth about how real companies and extremely important events like electing a President are all shaped by standards which have set the bar so low that responsibility doesn't exist in any form. `Trust Me' talks about the immediacy problem blogs have created and how it doesn't really contribute to a better story. Publishing news online before it's vetted gives us a few minutes or maybe a day's advance notice and the majority of the problems regarding our complicit approval of information that refuses to actually inform could be solved by taking away the immediacy. But what about when immediacy is vital? Take the snipers in Libya. They were taken down by the Social Media shotgun. Whenever a crew of snipers were spotted via camera phones, they were hastily shared on Twitter and local news literally saving lives and turning the tide for the rebels, who would send in grenadiers to take out their crow's nests. Perhaps there's a story to be written as well, but that kind of social media news is clearly a new spigot of information that doesn't appear as a counterpoint in Holiday's book to show how we can be taking advantage of instant news. But the book as it's written isn't meant to be a full digest of online media at large, it's a confession tape of a media abuser so it's obvious why it's left out. I just didn't see the immediacy problem as big when it comes to Twitter, it has it's uses for news, but I thought it was understood that 140 characters isn't enough. My last critique is only that he admits to not knowing how to solve the myriad of problems facing online news at large other than confessing he repeatedly took advantage of chinks in their armor and hopes by revealing his secrets they'll be better protected. If I worked for the New York Times I'd be sending Ryan an all white stetson in appreciation instead of casually correcting a post when he pretended to be a vinyl record lover and calling it a day. I was genuinely curious as to what his solutions might be and was a little disappointed to not even see one. Could you gamify the news so that accurate, and well written coverage gets rewarded in some arbitrary but entertaining way while shoddy inaccurate news is punished? Would a paywall ostensibly solve the bloggers' problem of having to publish far too many posts for quotas? How about utilizing digital wallets and social networks to create a system where people get credit for being sources, but give the credit back when consuming articles? In that scenario you establish a record of someone's name and wall off the garden without ever actually exchanging money. Oh well, perhaps in the next one. Awesome work Ryan, it was a great read. I'm not even lying.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Trading Up the Chain: Blogs, Bias, and the Dilemma of Delegated Trust
*by L***N on September 4, 2023*

In "Trust Me, I'm Lying," Ryan Holiday pulls back the curtain to reveal what is going on behind the scenes of online “blogs." For the book, Holiday defines a blog as any online site, from single-person operations up to the New York Times, which either purports to report current news or provides commentary. Holiday discusses how easy he found it to manipulate the blogosphere and how it ultimately creates a world of unreality, which, unfortunately, does intersect with the real world enough to cause destruction to the individual lives and businesses in the news. Summary of Contents Holiday's central thesis is that the blogosphere suffers from two major and interrelated problems: The first problem is that blogs suffer from fierce competition for table scraps of revenue. Since there is so little money to be made for most in blogging, bloggers race to publish first, most sensationally, and with complete disregard for the time required to ensure even reasonable veracity of their stories. The second related problem is that blogs seem to operate on a "delegated trust" model. Holiday argues that before blogs, news media had developed editorial standards that were about the same from publication to publication. This meant that if one outlet was reporting something, others had some confidence that the first had done their due diligence regarding the story's veracity. Holiday shows that there is now a wide variety of editorial standards, including, in many cases, none, that break this model. Holiday relates numerous cases showing how he exploited the weaknesses in the blogosphere to feed false information into the monster and then "trade it up the chain." For instance, starting with the lowest level blogs, hungry for any traffic that could go viral, he could get them to publish wholly made-up "leaks" from "anonymous sources" that he says were never verified. From this, a buzz would be created on low-level blogs that he would then mention to higher-level blogs, asking, "How can you not be covering this?" Holiday claims that by using this basic method, he and others could get publications all the way up to the New York Times to report on information completely manufactured out of whole cloth. Along with relating numerous instances of garbage information entering the system at the lowest levels and percolating up to the top, Holiday examines some of the underlying social science explaining why the system is so vulnerable to manipulation. Evaluation of the Book Given the amount of misinformation out there, which only continued to explode after the publication of the revised edition in 2017, this is the kind of book that any citizen of a democracy who interacts with online media or is affected by it (a long way of saying everyone) should read. Indeed, this book is now mandatory in many journalism schools and is required reading for new employees entering the news media to help their outlet avoid being victims of these manipulations. Although this book was a highly worthwhile read, it leaned a little too heavily toward numerous case studies instead of spending time on the underlying theory for me. In the preface, Holiday makes it clear, however, that this was a deliberate choice as he wanted to write a book on this critical topic that would be read instead of an academic treatise that would be ignored. Holiday used all the techniques he learned from the blogosphere, including heavy media manipulation, to have the book reach as extensive an audience as possible. Some of this is clearly demonstrated in the organization of the book. The chapters are short. Each is further broken down into multiple short sections with very few blocks of text longer than even a couple of pages. It is all designed to be exceptionally easy to consume. Although presenting much interesting theory, for example, research on how little time viewers spend reading an article and how likely they are to immediately "bounce" from a page, the tilting toward case studies came at the expense of making the stories repetitive after a while. I often read a story and wondered what new principle it was trying to establish versus what had already been established by previous stories. The second significant weakness of the book is that although it does delve somewhat into politics, it could have gone much deeper into underlying theories, such as "my side bias," of why people are so prone to political bias and how the media seems just as affected by these biases or, perhaps, even more so, than everyone else. Although the book's conclusion is already bleak, Holiday underestimated just how extreme political polarization would become, a situation that events since 2020, especially, have laid bare. In addition to these two weaknesses, it was unclear how everything described comes together in some cases. For example, Holiday mentions that there are a number of low readership blogs that are read by some very important people and thus have influence far beyond what their reader count would suggest. At the same time, Holiday says that since these blogs are tiny and do not get much traffic, they are easily manipulated by manipulations offering them more traffic. This claim did not make much sense to me. First, how does Holiday know where these low-traffic but influential blogs are? Second, it seems that the only way that important, and presumably at least somewhat intelligent, people would pay attention is if they were publishing high-quality content, as opposed to any junk that would generate traffic. Conclusion Despite the weaknesses mentioned, I understand that the book was written the way it was for a reason: to make it as accessible as possible. Given that many feel, looking back at historical examples, that online misinformation is following a pattern that has a high chance of becoming a risk to American democracy, this book provides an excellent look behind the scenes at how the online misinformation sausage is made.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ an Economic Hitman plays Liar's Poker
*by T***L on July 20, 2012*

Since 2008 you've probably gathered that Wall Street and the entire economic system that props it up is horribly corrupt and broken, in "Trust Me, I'm Lying" Ryan Holiday follows in the footsteps of Lewis and Perkins, painstakingly and yet engagingly laying bare a systemic case of dangerous and soulless hypocrisy. In Holiday's case it's the deception and immorality that's fueled the rise of Huff-Po, Gawker, and every other website that's cashed in on the rise of the Cthulhuian blogosphere. It does for the new era of social media and internet marketing what "Liar's Poker" did for the rise of Wall Street back in the 1980s, and "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" did for American foreign policy a decade later. And not only is it just as readable and impossible to put down as those largely autobiographical premiere books, but it may run the risk of serving as a siren-song instead of heeded as a warning in just the same way - at least if you put any credence into the initial reviews the book is getting. Although to a much greater extent than Lewis, Holiday falls more in line with Perkins and goes out of his way to decry his old way of life and attempts to implode the whole rotten house of crap-stained cards in on itself before it impacts the discourse of the mainstream media anymore than it already has. On Wall Street it was the trade of empty derivatives, bets about the results of other bets, none of which were rooted in the actual production of capital. Bernie Madoff may be the most recognizable name associated with Ponzi schemes, but in a sense just about everyone working in the financial trade of derivatives, CDOs, and default swaps was pushing their own version of Ponzi marketing. And so it goes on the web, as online "each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense. Blogs are built so someone else will want it - one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones - and millions of dollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets." And in the same way that Wall Street's malfeasance cost people their homes and their livelihoods, the intentional manipulation of mass market blogs has driven companies to ruin, lead to deadly riots abroad, and helped march America off to war with Iraq. In both cases, there's much more at stake than simply doing the Right Thing. As you read, it's hard not to imagine the startled and shameful look on a cannibalistic serial killer's face after you stumble onto him tearing into a pile of dead babies, limbs and viscera spread across the table - I never meant for it to get this far, Oh God what have I done? At times Holiday's logic is a touch circuitous, not too long after boasting about artificially rallying negative media coverage for Tucker Max's failed movie, he notes that making viewers feel uncomfortable is not solid marketing, that "unsettling images are not conducive to sharing" and asks "why would anyone - bloggers or readers - want to pass along bad feelings?" And although he carefully lays out how he "leaked" fake American Apparel ads in an effort to cheaply drive sales, he later laments that they were later used by blogs to case the company in a negative light - despite later observing that in the blogosphere the line between real and unreal is continuously blurred into oblivion. But these small slips don't detract from his arguments, if anything they bolster them - Holiday was submerged so deep into the cesspool for so long that he doesn't seem to have been able to shake off its last remaining tendrils just yet. Holiday's utterly compelling book uses a mix of anecdote, history, and philosophy to peel back the veneer of legitimacy that mass market blogs swath themselves in. Their cloak of "iterative journalism" which supposedly breaks and refines news faster and better than traditional journalism is shown to be nothing more than a Vegas pastie, meant only to help turn a cheap buck and having nothing to do with decency or service. "Trust Me, I'm Lying" is an immensely entertaining and informative read, Holiday's brutal honesty and impressive intellect combine into a thrilling and startling confessional that you won't be able to put down. Not, at least, until that blog page you have open right now refreshes itself with an EXCLUSIVE story about Kim Kardashian smuggling Suri Cruise out of the country by clenching the little tyke firmly between her butt-cheeks as she makes her way to the Paris premiere of "The Jersey Shore" movie. (And to see what Holiday did to mass market blogs done to international terrorism, check out: Tremble the Devil: "the story of terrorism as Jesus Christ, James Bond, and Osama bin Ladin would tell it."

---

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*Product available on Desertcart Slovakia*
*Store origin: SK*
*Last updated: 2026-10-26*