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1. an Economic Hitman plays Liar’s Poker
   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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2. 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 ContentsHoliday’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 BookGiven 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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3. O livro veio sem plástico de proteção, com a capa amassada e danificada. Claramente sofreu algumas quedas. Nunca tive problemas com livros na Amazon e por isso fiquei surpresa. Decidi não devolver pois comprei esse livro para ler durante o carnaval e é impossível receber um novo até amanhã kk

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4. Cose che già si sapevano, ovvero che i media mentono, ma questo libro è davvero illuminante perché racconta non solo come si fabbricano le false notizie, ma anche come si crea un trending topic e come una notizia (falsa) può danneggiare seriamente chi va contro il sistema.

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5. Si te gusta el marketing, este libro es increíble porque se sale de lo convencional y te muestra cómo las campañas o estrategias que vemos muchas veces están manipuladas.La primera mitad que es de enseñanzas está muy buena. A partir de la segunda mitad que son puras anecdotas, se vuelve un poco pesado

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6. Disturbing but interesting, it will totally change your point of view about online news

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7. The truth shall set you free and that is indeed what this book does. Kudos to Ryan for exposing what really goes on in the world of media and giving people a chance to decide on what news and information they choose to invest in.

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