Croyez-moi, je vous mens

Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out.

Charles Johnson doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action—it creates purpose and meaning. The only way to beat them is by controlling your reaction and letting them embarrass themselves, as they inevitably will.

the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded by rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find.

most of the main accusations were found to have been amplified or manipulated. But by that point the victims had already lost their jobs or been publicly branded.

This is how it works online. A writer finds a narrative to advance that is profitable to them, or perhaps that they are personally or ideologically motivated to advance, and are able to thrust it into the national consciousness before anyone has a chance to bother checking if it’s true or not.

Think about how bullshit that is: Because the Jezebel piece came first, the letter from the Daily Show women is shown merely as a response instead of the refutation that it actually was. [...] They could never undo what they’d been accused of—no matter how spurious the accusation—they could only deny it. And denials don’t mean anything online.

Set up your own think tank. Call it the Millennial Entrepreneurs Foundation and put out “research” that really just makes companies think they need to hire you as a consultant. Don’t think climate change is real? Have a business interest in making people think it isn’t? Fund “studies” that confirm what you want and then blast the internet with them. Want to invent some ridiculous new trend? Hire experts to say it’s correlated with higher sex drive or that it’s all the rage with celebrities. Sadly, no one is going to question you.

Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse. And then, when criticized, publishers throw up their hands as if to say, “We wish people liked better stuff too,” as if they had nothing to do with it. Well, they do.

The Huffington Post does not wish to be the definitive account of a story or inform people—since the reaction to that is simple satisfaction.

According to the Huffington Post’s pageview strategy, the paid articles are indisputably better, because they generated more comments and traffic (like a 2009 article about the Iranian protests that got 96,281 comments). In a sane system, a political article that generated thousands of comments would be an indicator that something went wrong. It means the conversation descended into an unproductive debate about abortion or immigration, or devolved into mere complaining. But in the broken world of the web, it is the mark of a professional.