Beggars, Fake News and Google - Book Thoughts on Trust Me, I Am Lying

"In America, even beggars have cars," I was told by a friend when I was a kid of about five or six growing up in Bengaluru, India. This was a time before the internet when even blockbuster Hollywood movies arrived a couple of months or years after they were released...all depending on the whims of the distributors. Most beggars in India are very poor (to the levels unimaginable in the West), dress in rags, live on the streets and mostly suffer hunger all the time. Most beg at traffic lights. As a kid it was difficult for me to imagine such a person in the US to be driving in cars, stopping at the traffic lights to beg.

But it had to be real as I trusted my friend. I believed it to be real for a very long time.

It was a harmless lie that my friend may have made up. But in this age of major news channels and newspapers following blogs to pick up trending stories, it is not very difficult to create a story out of nothing, says Ryan Holiday in this book. He goes on to show in the book about how he created such stories and got free publicity by major media outlets by starting small rumors in blogs that are competing for dramatic headlines to attract attention. In the latter part of the book, he explains that extreme difficulty in managing this monster once you let it out.

Remember, this book came out in 2012, even before the whole fake news racket being run out of Macedonia where a large number of jobless youth are hired for only creating fake news sites (Google 'fake news Macedonia'...interesting read).

This book is an interesting read if you are curious about numerous Google Now cards showing up on your phone that direct you some lesser known sites that masquerade as news outlets but are just grocery-store-check-out-counter-tabloids in electronic format.