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

Ryan Holiday — a former director of marketing who ran influence campaigns for American Apparel and Tucker Max — wrote this book as a confessional: a step-by-step account of how he systematically manipulated the online media ecosystem by planting stories in small blogs, knowing they would be picked up by larger outlets, creating the appearance of genuine news coverage where none existed. The book is part exposé, part how-to guide, and deeply uncomfortable reading for anyone who has uncritically consumed online media.

Trust Me, I'm Lying is essential for counter-disinformation practitioners because it documents, from the inside, the mechanics of information manipulation at a level of operational detail that most academic accounts cannot provide. The techniques Holiday describes — manufactured outrage, strategic leaking, the exploitation of media incentives and publication deadlines — are the same techniques used, at much greater scale and sophistication, in state-sponsored influence operations. Understanding how media ecosystems can be gamed by relatively low-resourced commercial actors is prerequisite to understanding how they can be exploited by well-resourced state actors. Holiday has since become an unlikely advocate for Stoic philosophy, but this early work remains his most important contribution.