There is no more Big Lie, only Big Lulz, and getting gamed is no shame. It’s the seal on the social contract, a mark of our participation in this new covenant of cozening.
—WIRED
YOU SIT DOWN TO YOUR COMPUTER TO WORK. FIVE minutes later you’re on your fifth YouTube video of talking babies. What happened? Do you just not have any self-control? Sorry, but self-control has got nothing to do with it. Not when the clip was deliberately made more attractive by subliminally embedded images guaranteed to catch your attention. Not when the length of the video was calibrated to be precisely as long as average viewers are statistically most likely to watch. Not when autoplay starts the next video before you have time to click away.
Would you also be surprised to hear that the content of the video was designed around popular search terms? And that the title went through multiple iterations to see which got the most clicks? And what if the video you watch after this one (and the one after that and after that) had been recommended and optimized by YouTube with the deliberate intention of making online video take up as much time in your life as television does?1
No wonder you can’t get any work done. They won’t let you.
The key, as megawatt liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advised when interviewed for the book Making It in the Political Blogosphere, is to keep readers addicted: “The idea is to discourage people from drifting away. If you give them a break, they might find that there’s something else that’s just as good, and they might go away.”
We once naively believed that blogs would be a boon to democracy. Unlike TV, the web wasn’t about passive consumption. Blogs were about engagement and citizen activism. Blogs looked like they would free us from a crummy media world of bias, conflict, manipulation, and sensationalism. But as James Fenimore Cooper presciently observed in the nineteenth century, “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”
Tyranny is an understatement for the media today. Those between the ages of eight and eighteen are online roughly eight hours a day, a figure that does not include texting or television. America spends more than fifty billion minutes a day on Face-book, and nearly a quarter of all internet browsing time is spent on social media sites and blogs. In a given month, blogs stream something like 150 million videos to their users. So of course there is mass submission and apathy—everyone is distracted, deliberately so.2
The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.
You see a link to a video in a YouTube search that makes it look like a hot girl is in it, so you click. You watch, but she’s nowhere to be found. Welcome to the art of “thumbnail cheating.” It’s a common tactic YouTube publishers use to make their videos more tantalizing than the competition.
The most common play is to use a girl, preferably one who looks like she might get naked, but it can be anything from a kitten to a photo of someone famous. Anything to give the clip an edge. Some of the biggest accounts on YouTube were built this way. The technique can drive thousands or even tens of thousands of views to a video, helping it chart on “most viewed” lists and allowing it to spread and be recommended.
Online video publishers do this with YouTube’s consent. Originally, YouTube chose a video thumbnail from the halfway, one-quarter, or three-quarters points of the video. So smart manipulators simply inserted a single frame of a sexy image at exactly one of those points in order to draw clicks. Members of the YouTube Partner Program—the people who get paid for their contributions to You-Tube through ad revenue and make millions for the company—are allowed to use any image they choose as their thumbnail, even images that don’t ever appear in the video. Sure, YouTube asks that the image be “representative,” but if they were actually serious about quashing profitable trickery, why allow the practice at all?
Because this is an endless battle for clicks and attention. Everyone is trying to get an edge.
I was speaking with my father the other day and he asked me a question about some news story he’d read. What he said was confusing and didn’t quite add up. So I looked online and found it. Oops, the story was from the Onion. It was satire. Shared on Facebook and glanced at only for its headline, though, it seemed real. No wonder people voted a notorious liar into office—they’ve gotten used to being lied to!
The Onion isn’t the only one who exploits this phenomenon, of course. Andy Borowitz, the left-wing satirist, knows that a huge portion of his traffic comes from unthinking clicks by people who confuse satire with real headlines. And the New Yorker, who publishes him, benefits from that confusion.
More recently we’ve seen a rise in publications that specialize in almost outright propaganda—actual fake news. Sites like Denver Guardian, Info Wars, National Report, 70 News, The Political Insider, and Ending the Fed. Headlines like fbi agent suspected in hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder-suicide. wikileaks CONFIRMS hillary sold weapons to isis . . . then drops another BOMBSHELL! BREAKING: fox news exposes traitor megyn kelly, kicks her out for backing hillary. These are not real publications and the claims in those headlines are not true. But that’s precisely the point. They feel true. People share and spread them for the same reasons that, deep down, motivate you to share most of the articles you share on Facebook or Twitter, as Ricky Van Veen pointed out in his excellent TEDx talk: They confirm what you want to be true and what you want to reflect your identity.
Even when the sites are reputable, the content might not be. Even reputable outlets seem to be unable to resist the urge to traffic in fake news. For instance, I’m no fan of Ben Carson. When I saw this USA Today headline, I just shook my head: ben carson just referred to slaves as “immigrants.” What an asshole, right? The New York Times headline is not much better: ben carson refers to slaves as “immigrants” in first remarks to hud staff. If the Times and USA Today say it, it’s got to be true. But it was because I had this immediately negative reaction to Ben Carson, because it seemed almost too boneheaded even for him, that I urged myself to check the article out. Turns out, after speaking about immigrants coming to America via Ellis Island, Carson had said:
There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.
Only someone trying to deliberately wrench those remarks out of context would think Carson—who is black, by the way—was referring to slaves as willing immigrants. He clearly said they came here in slave ships and was making a point most people who disagree with his policies would agree with—that African Americans have had to work even harder than immigrants to fulfill even the most basic dreams for their children. Yet all of that was lost because somebody wanted to get more traffic for their article.
I still don’t like Ben Carson. But I dislike him for real reasons, not because of fake news. I cannot stress enough how important this distinction is. The more an article feels like it is true, the more skeptical you should be about it. If you haven’t heard of the website before, it’s probably because it’s not legitimate. Be discerning. Be cynical. Don’t let “close enough” be your standard for truth and opinion. Insist on accuracy and on getting it right.
Ever noticed those little “From Our Partners” or “From Around the Web” thumbnails and links that appear on the pages of basically every major online publisher these days, from the Huffington Post to CNN.com to Slate? If you didn’t know, those sites aren’t really “partners.” These links are not handpicked stories that the site’s editors thought worthy of referral (would anyone ever willingly link to an article from Allstate Insurance?).
No, these links are part of an ad unit. The biggest providers in this space are companies like Taboola and Outbrain. The point is to trick users interested in more content into clicking on scammy ads loosely disguised as content: “People Struggling with Credit Card Debt May Be in for a Big Surprise.” “My Wife and I Tried Blue Apron: Here’s What Happened.” “10 Celebs Who Lost Their Hot Bodies.” Even as I write this, the New York Times is running their own version of one of these ads at the top of their site: “Why Irish Pubs Are a Metaphor for American Immigration” . . . sponsored by Guinness.
It’s probably not a coincidence that a good many of those links have bikini-photo thumbnails, weight-loss “success” stories, or celebrity names in the headline. Sites get paid by the click and users can’t unclick, so tactics that encourage that action are all that matter at the end of the day. More important, great content publishers are far less likely to need to buy traffic than crappy publishers or scammy salespeople. It’s just people selling credit cards and mindless gossip at high margins’ need to chase the idiots who click those things.
If that feels a little gross, it should. When you’re on Fusion.net, thinking they care about you, in fact, they’ve done the calculation and found that it’s more profitable to send you away to another site than it is to keep you there reading more of the original content they make themselves.
Of course, not every site makes this bargain. I asked Patrick de Laive, cofounder of TheNextWeb.com, why “From Our Partners” links were conspicuously absent from his site. His reply: “The main reason why we’re not doing something like that is that we don’t see the value for our readers. It might be an okay revenue stream, but as long as there is no clear value for our readers, we don’t want to bother them with it.” But the reality is most sites do.
I remember seeing Jeff Jarvis, the blogger best known for his condescending media pontificating, at a tech conference once. He sat down next to me, ostensibly to watch and listen to the talk. Not once did he look up from his laptop. He tapped away the entire time, first on Twitter, then on Facebook, then moderating comments on his blog, and on and on, completely oblivious to the world. It struck me then that whatever I decided to do with the rest of my life, I did not want to end up like him. Because at the end of the talk, Jarvis got up and spoke during the panel’s Q&A, addressing the speakers as well as the audience. In the world of the web, why should not paying attention preclude you from getting your say?
That’s what web culture does to you. Psychologists call this the “narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something. In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote:
The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance. . . . He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed.3
This is the exact reaction that our current online system produces: apathy without self-awareness. To keep you so caught up and consumed with the bubble that you don’t even realize you’re in one. The more time kids spend online, studies show, the worse their grades are. According to a Nielsen study, active social networkers are 26 percent more likely to give their opinion on politics and current events offline, even though they are exactly the people whose opinions should matter the least.
“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kier kegaard once said. Now you know why sharing, commenting, clicking, and participating are pushed so strongly by blogs and entertainment sites. They don’t want silence. No wonder blogs auto-refresh with new material every thirty seconds. Of course they want to send updates to your phone and include you on e-mail alerts. No one is listening to you—they’re laughing at you. They’re glad you’re distracted. They’re happy you’re posting on social media, because it means you’re not showing up at city council meetings, because it means you’re not voting. It’s time that both sides face up to the incredible manipulation that’s happening to both parties (by that I mean people, not political parties). Twitter isn’t designed to help you get in and get out with the best information as quickly as possible—it’s supposed to suck you into either a contentious world of argument and debate or an echo chamber that reassures you everyone thinks like you do. Facebook is supposedly one of the largest news sources in the world, and days after the election, it denied that the news it shared could have possibly impacted users’ behavior in a significant way. With manipulative tactics that range from exploiting the so-called attention gap to giving voice to propagandistic campaign surrogates to addictive UX features to editors warping coverage around their own “narrative,” we’re all drowning in a sea of unreality.
If the users stop for even a second, they may see what is really going on. And then the business model would fall apart.
My son was born on November 9, 2016. The surprise of the election results had sent my wife into labor. The previous few months had been particularly unhappy ones for me. Not because there was anything wrong in my life; on the contrary, in my life things were going quite well. The source of my misery? I was caught up in the news cycle.
I told myself it was partly my job. But the reality was, I was doing less of my job. How could it have been otherwise? I’d become consumed by a divisive, contentious, scandal-driven news loop. Twitter. Google News. Apple News. Facebook. Longreads and hot takes via Instapaper. CNN. E-mail conversations. NPR.
My media diet had gone from abstemious to addicted. As we sat in the recovery room and I caught myself pulling up my Twitter account to read another article from another person who had undoubtedly been wrong about the election (as I myself embarrassingly had), I felt a wave of shame. What the hell was I doing? Here, in the hospital, in this important moment in my life, I was trying to read the news?
I’d venture to guess that there is someone else who, deep down, can at least relate to that sentiment: fellow (and admitted) news junkie, and now president, Donald Trump.
It’s time we all came to terms with our compulsion: How is anyone going to make America or themselves great again, if we’re all glued to our devices and television screens? How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you’re doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?
To think it is his morning viewing of Fox & Friends, his evening tune-in to Hannity, and his regular checking of silly conspiracy-ridden Twitter accounts that have been responsible for some of his administration’s most boneheaded and unnecessary scandals.
In the 1990s political scientists began to speak about what they called the CNN effect. The basic premise was that a world of twenty-four-hour media coverage would have considerable impact on foreign and domestic policy. When world leaders, generals, and politicians watch their actions—and the actions of their counterparts—dissected, analyzed, and speculated about in real time, the argument goes, it changes what they do and how they do it . . . much for the worse.
When they came up with this theory, CNN was mostly a niche channel. The idea that it would soon be only a part of a vast attention-sucking ecosystem that went far beyond broadcasting twenty-four hours a day was inconceivable. Today the news machine includes not only dozens of cable channels but also millions of blogs and hundreds of millions of social media accounts—all of which operate in real time, creating billions of bits of content a second.
How can anyone make tough decisions while trying to keep abreast of this? How do they know what is real chatter and what is fake? The answer is they can’t. They just get whipped around and are as confused as everyone else.
I marked the day after the election by doing the following: I deleted Twitter from my phone. I deleted Facebook from my phone. I deleted the Google News app from my phone. I figured out how to remove Apple News from Siri. I removed CNN from my nightly scan of the television channels.
I wasn’t interested in being jerked around anymore. I didn’t need to follow every meaningless update or fall for every outrageous headline. It was preventing me from seeing the bigger pictures. Now, if only politicians and leaders could do the same. The world would be a better place.