Outliars: A Discourse Guide to Fact-Checking and Click-Baiting

In "Outliars," Angie Waller examines the role of click-friendly headlines in amplifying misinformation during the Trump administration, using data from a 28-year archive of The New York Times. Connecting the themes of outliers and liars, the book depicts the heightened media coverage of Trump relative to past US presidential administrations and the impact technologies such as search engine optimization and headline A/B testing may have on this phenomenon. The book annotates headlines in a manner suited for an algorithmic lie detector, highlighting the futility of filtering out the noise amongst ambiguous headlines.