Trust Me I'm Lying

This was an interesting read. While it incurs the risk of becoming a manual on how to manipulate media, it opens your eyes to something obvious: a lot of stuff is purely made up. This hopefully is no news to the reader, although seeing it spelled out gave me the chills. The trickery and the extent bloggers go to create reality from nothing is astounding. There are so many tricks and lies that it's hard to assume anything you read is real. What I gathered from this book was more ideas on how to make disinformation slowly disappear. How can we create a better internet empowered by modern tooling (AI anyone?)?

As I was nearing the end I stumbled upon a few things, factful.io from HN, and a new Wikipedia extension that leverages AI for source verification. How serendipitous. That said, I'm hoping to be able to cut out some time to prototype a few tools/extensions. I'd like to see innovation focus on improving and refining the quality of web content, rather than making it a race to beat a benchmark.

If you were already skeptical about news and blogs, this book will resonate and go into detail on how we are deceived. I think there's some fluff to it and it could have been reduced to a much shorter book but some of the examples add color. They make you see clearly what type of damage this practice can do to people. Pick it up if you can, it's worth a read.