How This Left-Wing Activist Manipulates the Media to Spread His Message
EXCLUSIVE: How This Left-Wing Activist Manipulates the
Media to Spread His Message
'Jetsetting terrorist' Peter Young tells us how he gets
malleable bloggers and lazy journalists to generate outrage and attention for
him
By Ryan Holiday | 02/11/15 10:16am
I first heard of Peter Young when a reporter at the Daily
Dot asked me if I was somehow involved in 2013’s “Ex-Vegans” stunt in which
dozens of former vegans were exposed for having eaten meat. After dominating
the media cycle for several days, the surprise left hook of the campaign
landed: All the traffic and inbound links were redirected to footage of
appalling slaughterhouse conditions. Hundreds of thousands of people were
unwittingly exposed to the very unpleasantness that media attempts to shield
from them.
I’m not a vegan, and I had nothing to do with the
campaign—but I do have a lot of respect for its brilliance and execution and
for the fact that it reveals a salient fact about our times. Today’s media
system is a bit like an emperor with no clothes. Peter Young resembles nothing
so much as Mathew Carpenter, the man who recently turned a stunt about shipping
glitter to your enemies into $100,000. They both understand intuitively how the
media works and have used it repeatedly to advance their interests. While they
did what they did for very different reasons, I learned that they’d both read
my book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, and it had influenced their actions.
I thought I would interview Mr. Young because he recently
ran another campaign of media manipulation, in this case intended to reveal and
expose problems with the TSA watch list (a system which he is intimately
familiar with since he is, in fact, on it). In less than eight hours, his
blog—which he had constructed entirely for the purposes of getting
attention—was picked up places like Boing Boing, Techdirt and Forbes. And now
he’s ready to explain exactly what he does to advance his ideology and how it
works in today’s online-driven culture. He assures me the answers below and the
stories on his site are 100 percent true. I’ll leave it to you whether or not
you want to trust him.
“The unspoken conspiracy that you speak of, that exists
between journalists and those seeking publicity is very real. If you have a
story that provokes—real or not—they have the time. Give them the promise of
traffic and a little plausible denial and you’re in.”
So tell us, are you really on the TSA watch list and how
did that happen?
In 1998, I was charged with Animal Enterprise Terrorism
for my role in freeing foxes and mink from fur farms. This amounted to cutting
fences and opening cages at six farms. Under the weight of an 82-year maximum
sentence, I became a fugitive for seven years, lived under several aliases, and
was arrested at a Starbucks in 2005. I served two years in prison.
Because of the “terrorist” label, in the years since I’ve
had my house raided by the FBI twice, been named as suspect in several animal
liberations, found laptops with dead batteries fully charged when removed from
storage a year later (do the math), had my garbage stolen by the authorities,
and learned a woman who took me on trip to Moab was working for the FBI.
Of it all, the TSA attention is among the least
intrusive.
Now, how does that differ from what was reported in the
media and what you put up on your blog? Is there any part of the record you can
clear up for us?
Before my anonymity as “the jetsetting terrorist” was
compromised by Forbes, I described the crime that put me on the TSA’s watch
list as an “activist-related property crime.” Animals are considered property
in the eyes of the law, so this was accurate. As for the rest: It wouldn’t be
possible to untangle all the misinformation reported in the media and elsewhere
over the years. I can’t complain. I probably planted half of it anyway.
[Editor Note: From what Mr. Young told me when he
originally reached out, he created the blog, uploaded the posts, then backdated
them so it seemed older and more organic. And until this article was published,
no outlet doubted the intentions/legitimacy of the blog.]
Tell us how and why you decided to make this something
the media would pounce on? What did you do? How did it work? How much traffic
/attention did it get?
The Jetsetting Terrorist was launched with the stated
goal of going mainstream within two weeks. It took about eight hours. The
specific end-goal was The Alex Jones Show. While culturally considered fringe,
he has a larger platform than most websites and TV shows. And he hates the TSA.
(Spoiler alert: Alex has yet to call me.)
My blueprint—straight from your Trust Me, I’m Lying
playbook—was as follows:
•Set up an anonymous burner email account.
•Identify people (leftist/libertarian-leaning celebrities
and public figures) with large Twitter followings, get their personal email
addresses.
•Email them a link to the site and a two-line email about
how this is the best site ever and how “surprised” I am they haven’t tweeted it
yet. Pretty simple.
•Trade it up the chain until hitting something big.
•Leverage my anonymity to offer Alex Jones the exclusive
on my identity reveal, for an interview.
Why Twitter? Better credibility-to-ease-of-penetration
ratio. Here’s what I mean:
Writing a blog post is a time investment. Bloggers are
selective of what they dedicate a post to. A prolific blogger might post once
or twice a day. A Tweet is copy, paste, done. A prolific Twitter user might
post on Twitter 20-plus times a day. But for the purpose of leveraging mentions
to receive larger mentions, they are the same: A single tweet has a unique URL
that can be sent to larger platforms needing some social proof before running a
story. In short, baiting John Cusack into tweeting a link is lower-effort,
higher-yield than coverage on a low-level libertarian blog.
I didn’t have to go far. Within a few hours of going
live, I (anonymously) sent a link to Sean Bonner. Sean and I had spoken at the
same conference once and met afterwards. I was a fan of his email newsletter,
and he had a decent Twitter following. More importantly: He was a former
contributor to Boing Boing.
As a major driver of virality, Boing Boing was a prized
target. Going through a current contributor was like storming the gates. Going
through a former contributor was sneaking in the back door. Sean tweeted it
within minutes. With the anonymous burner account, I sent a link to the tweet
to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing. A few hours later, it was on Boing Boing.
From there I set up 10 more burner accounts and
carpet-bombed the Internet with this email:
This is on the front page of Boing Boing right now but
they just did a weak copy/paste job. Would like to see ____ cover this
properly.
A white hipster writes hilarious stories about TSA
encounters, and flying while on the terrorist watch list. Too good.
The author is anonymous, but worth a try.
I sent this to exactly 103 journalists. I tweaked it
slightly to appeal to specific targets. My approach was not scattershot. The
majority of emails were sent to journalists who had previously covered the TSA
or other civil liberties issues. If done right, you’re adding value to the
journalist. It is an equitable exchange.
Immediately thereafter, Forbes contacted me for an
interview. In a follow up email, the reporter stated she had done a
reverse-lookup of my cell number and determined my real identity. The
story—outing me as “the jetsetting terrorist”—ran the following week, bringing
attention to both the TSA and the bigger issue of classifying a broad segment
of the population as “terrorists.”
Creating the site and content took three days. And it was
methodically crafted to maximize virality.
The elements were:
Anonymity: Mystique is powerful.
It’s never been done: With so much talk about the TSA, no
one had gone quite as public with their experiences on the TSA’s terrorist
watch list.
Awesome content: There’s no shortcut here. I have a
background as a writer, and while I wrote with haste, I put care into
maximizing the impact of the prose. A collection of generic and poorly written
TSA stories would have gone nowhere.
Riding the wave of an ongoing conversation: Controversy
over the TSA was a regular part of the public debate. There was a pent up
demand for a new angle on an increasingly stale subject.
Solid tagline: “I’m a convicted terrorist. I travel a
lot. And the TSA won’t leave me alone. This is my diary of traveling as a
marked man.” I spent a lot of time crafting that.
Going hipster: The original “about me” sidebar read “How
a jetsetting hipster became a jetsetting hipster terrorist.” While subtle,
portraying myself as a “hipster” was in all likelihood the determining factor
in making this viral. When you get “terrorist,” “jetsetter,” and “hipster” in
one place, It’s too absurd to not spread. You’re clicking that link. (This was,
by the way, the only part I changed when my identity was revealed. Calling
myself a “hipster” just isn’t accurate. And no one uses that word
self-referentially.)
A powerful narrative: There are 1,000 ways to tell the
same story. I put effort into maximizing chances of this getting picked up by
utilizing timeless literary narratives, accentuating the underdog effect, the
reluctant hero, and (subtle) revenge themes.
Niching down: The original plan was “The Hipster
Terrorist”—anonymous (and 100 percent true) stories from a convicted
“terrorist” documenting the humorous side-effects of life under the “terrorist”
label. From stories about awkward dinner-table conversation when meeting a
girlfriend’s parents, to the baristas at the Starbucks I frequent googling my
name (hilarity ensues). While this would be a great blog (and a book I’ll
probably write soon), it lacked any timely discussion to piggyback on. Niching
down to the TSA was clearly the right move.
Before this, you manipulated the media with a stunt to
drive attention to conditions in slaughterhouses and factory farms. Why do you
feel justified in essentially tricking or circumventing the news process in
order to get your message across? Is this something you think more advocates
should do?
The game plan for The Vegan Sellout List was this:
•Launch a site that allowed people to anonymously submit
the names and photos of former vegans, and the story behind their rise and fall
from veganism.
•Pre-populate the list with 100 former vegans who have a
platform (from celebrities to ex-vegans with high-traffic blogs).
Email all 100 with
a link to their entry on the site, and bait them into mentioning it in a blog
post or Tweet.
•Concurrently, generate buzz in the vegan blogosphere.
•Parlay all of this to successively bigger blogs, until
it hit a huge site that generated serious traffic.
•Pull a bait-and-switch, forcing visitors to watch a
video of slaughterhouse footage before entering.
“The Vegan Sellout List” was what the Internet craved:
Offensive, provocative, shameless, and impossible not to have an opinion on.
From launch the goal was Gawker. We would consider it a success if we hit
Gawker. (We spent a considerable amount of time trying to identify writers at
Gawker who were former vegans to provoke coverage by making it personal,
without success. Gawker ran the story in under three weeks anyway.)
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