The Psychology of Stupidity by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

MANIPULATION ON THE INTERNET: THE ART IN ITS INFANCY

Here are two of the many techniques Ryan Holiday used to create an event out of nothing.

Pass yourself off as an expert. Easy! Register with a site like Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which specializes in putting journalists in touch with specialists in a wide range of fields, sparing reporters the labor of doing their own research. Many American journalists use the site. For several months, Ryan Holiday, registered under his real name, passed himself off as, among other things, a collector of vinyl records (to The New York Times), an incurable insomniac (to ABC News), and the victim of a bacteriological attack (to the twenty-four-hour news channel MSNBC). Not one journalist verified his statements or took the trouble to look at what Google revealed about him, which openly describes him as a media manipulator. When he let the cat out of the bag, he attracted the attention of seventy-five media outlets and generated more than 1.5 million web clicks.

Create a fake scandal. In Los Angeles, to announce the release of a comic film by his great friend Tucker Max (author of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell), Ryan Holiday put up film posters, then stuck stickers on them that said “Tucker Max Deserves to Have his Dick Caught in a Steel Jaw Trap.” He then sent photos to various local blogs under a pseudonym, congratulating himself on the hostile reaction they provoked. While doing this, he also reached out to LGBT university associations and feminist groups to court condemnation for Tucker Max. In less than two weeks, the controversy spread to the Fox News website, to The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Result: huge publicity for the film, and a rise to #1 in sales for the book that inspired it.

“Hoaxes succeed for a very simple reason,” Ryan Holiday explains. “When they turn out to be true, it’s news. If they’re not true, journalists can write articles to revisit the situation, which gives them two clips for the same story. They busy themselves writing explanations about the pseudoinformation that they themselves made popular, and so it continues.”

For another of Tucker Max’s books, Ryan Holiday offered a gift of $500,000 to Planned Parenthood in Dallas. In exchange, one clinic would have to bear the name “Tucker Max.” The gift was refused. And here’s where the scandal came in. In apparent response to the clinic spitting on a $500,000 gift, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation withdrew its funding. Then changed its mind. PETA let it be known that it would accept Tucker Max’s gift to care for animals. In the end, two hundred media outlets covered the controversy, generating more than 3 million page views and extending the new Tucker Max book’s stay on The New York Times bestseller list. (It entered the list at #2.) Initial investment: $0.00. “Our objective was very clearly to troll the media and provoke reactions and debate so we wouldn’t have to pay for a publicity campaign,” Ryan Holiday blithely concedes.

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