Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet—and Why We're Following
Introduction
Page 22 "If people want you, they'll want what you've got." Page 26 These days on the internet, no one has to know you're a fraud. With just a few of the right assets -- some combination of a well- curated Instagram or Twitter account with a decent following, a professional website, a celebrity spokesperson, and maybe a sprinkling of those Russian- bot likes -- it's not hard to get internet users, bloggers, and even the mainstream press to accept an Instagram Story as fact, Page 28 In my opinion, all of this has had a flattening effect, where there's no difference online anymore between a Kardashian and someone we actually know, with all the real- life lines separating them blurred and eroded until we feel like these strangers are sort of our friends, and we like their content and comment below as if we know them. Chapter 1: The Cult of Flounder
Page 66 The official Oxford definition of post-truth is "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Page 66 Somehow PR has replaced journalism Page 73 It's very hard, in the early, nascent embryonic stages of a business, to really -- and I'm being intellectually honest here -- know if somebody is going to be an absolute genius or a total fraud. Because the best storytellers are also the best con men. Page 76 People screw up mostly, not because they're just intentional frauds, at least in their own minds, but because they will tell themselves a story that makes them feel like they're one of the good guys, even as they do bad things," Prentice said. "When they're charming and energetic and persuasive, they can take a lot of people along with them, unfortunately. Chapter 3: Under the Influencer
Page 144 As humans, we're deeply motivated to accept what the people around us say is true, even when it obviously isn't. We've known about this problem for a while, though that doesn't seem to have helped us resist it any. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1950s by the psychologist Solomon Asch, subjects confirmed time and time again that all it takes to convince us to think something is a sense that everyone else thinks it. In one experiment, for example, he showed subjects a series of three lines and asked them to identify the one that matched the length of a fourth line. His subjects had no problem picking out the correct line -- until they were put in a room of actors who deliberately chose one of the incorrect answers. About 75 percent of the subjects chose the obviously incorrect line at least once, all thanks to peer pressure. And the pressure gets worse when the liars are our friends or people we'd like to be friends with. Page 154 But Bernstein is Insta- famous (and I am not) because she figured out over time how to post things that people want, and by posting things people want, she's figured out how to sell other things to them and that makes her valuable in an increasingly online society. Page 155 "Identity is just such a facile thing, but people think their identities are fixed. But some very successful people are able to craft an identity and realize that an identity is something very, very malleable, that it can be worked to an advantage," says Cavazos. Page 161 Arguably, the prototype of the influencer exists as far back as the Holy Roman Empire, explains Cavazos. Page 162 "If you go way back to the Romans, they actually had an organization called United Artists, the gladiators and certain legionnaires and distinguished proconsuls would lend their name to the entertainments and get a cut. So this is an old thing. It's just an old thing but was enabled dramatically with technology." Chapter 4: The Allegory of the Fave
Page 196 The average social media user might be the customer for influencers, but at some point down the line, we also consented to selling our own data for the privilege. In exchange for some social interaction and a big hit of affirmation, these apps get to track us across the internet -- and off it -- and sell the information to advertisers and shadowy data brokers who compile profiles of us and then sell them to other advertisers until every ad we see has been carefully targeted just for us. But worse than that, the platforms are constantly learning how to keep us locked into their sites for as long as possible, which means algorithmically learning how to arouse our emotions in a manner not unlike a slot machine until we're drunk, spinning around on our digital swivel seats, pulling the refresh screen like a lever hoping that maybe this time we'll hit. "We have become more isolated, we're lonelier, our emotions are therefore more easily manipulated, and this is why we fall for scams," said Antonova. "When you see how lonely we really are on a regular basis, I think that's one of the big factors as to why, even though we have the tools at our disposal, a part of us just wants to be fooled just so we can feel less alone. And I'm very sympathetic to that." Page 203 The more we observe people being rewarded for particular behaviors, the more likely we are to emulate them, a tendency first observed by the Canadian- American psychologist Albert Bandura. In a series of experiments that formed his core social- learning theory, Bandura found that "most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action." 152 Page 204 social media isn't easing the emotions that trigger their use -- it's exacerbating them. Page 220 when you define your identity by the brands you purchase and the products that you consume, you become locked into an endless cycle of purchase and consumption in order to justify to yourself that identity." Page 226 One 2017 study190 found that on Twitter, "our estimates suggest that between 9 percent and 15 percent of active Twitter accounts are bots," which means close to fifty million users on the platform are actually fake. Page 226 the number of Twitter followers a celebrity has can be seen as a type of cue used by consumers to gauge the celebrity's trustworthiness and credibility. Page 227 In our modern society, followers are currency, whether you're advertising for money or not. Page 227 And as the tools to detect bots grow stronger, the bot companies are responding in kind. These armies of bots are controlled by companies like Devumi, which the New York Times recently discovered had served around "200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models" in their quest to look more popular online. 194 Page 227 the analytics site SparkToro ran a 2018 analysis of Donald Trump's following and found a whopping 61 percent (more than thirty- three million accounts) following him are fake. Chapter 5: Fyre in the Hole
Page 235 "reputation management." Page 244 The truth was McFarland and the Fyre team weren't interested in creating experiences. They just wanted to see what they could get people to pay for. The people buying tickets didn't care about the musical acts -- the fact that there were none was testament alone. Their ticket holders cared about the photos and how their vacation was going to look to other people following them online. And Fyre was ready to cash in on that. Chapter 6: On the Internet No One Knows You're a Fraud Page 264 "I think Caroline is a victim of growing up steeped in that culture of it's more important what you appear to be than what you actually are.