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
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.
'Jetsetting terrorist' Peter Young tells us how he gets malleable bloggers and lazy journalists to generate outrage and attention for him
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.