There’s a meme that took off after the Vice Presidential Debate earlier this week. It shows two “quotes”, one from each participant.
Pence- “Trump and I trust the American people to make choices for themselves and their families. Harris and Biden want to mandate how you care for yourself“.
Harris- “The American people aren’t equipped to make these decisions for themselves.“
The problem is, neither of these are accurate. In fact, they’re wildly inaccurate. Both candidates were paraphrased in the meme, not quoted verbatim, even though the use of quotation marks indicate those were their exact words. And both candidates were paraphrased poorly.
What Senator Harris said was “It is asking too much of the people that they would not be equipped with the information they need to help themselves to protect their parents and their children.” What she was saying was that it would be difficult for people to make decisions for themselves without having all of the information.
What VP Pence said was “…President Trump and I trust the American people to make choices in the best interest of their health. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris consistently talk about mandates, and not just mandates with the coronavirus but a government takeover of health, the Green New Deal [interrupted by moderator] all government control. The paraphrasing of this statement was slightly better but still wasn’t even close to what he actually said.
But I’m not here to talk about how to properly quote or paraphrase someone. I’m here to talk about why sometimes even the most hard-to-believe memes go viral.
People are gullible. Memes are designed to evoke an emotional response and many people allow that to happen. They’re designed to get people to react instead of think. A lot of people fall for the trap, believe it unquestionably, and click “share”.
People want to believe. When people see something they want to believe is true, they tend to believe it, regardless of how ridiculous it is. If the meme reinforces what they already believe then they’re even more likely to believe it and share it with others.
People are generally lazy. It’s super easy to click on the “share” button but it takes some effort to do a little research. “Little” being the keyword here. It took me less than a minute to find their real quotes and figure out that the meme was wrong. Why don’t more people do their own fact-checking? Because they’re lazy.
People don’t care. There are a lot of people who know that the meme is false or misleading, and they share it anyway. They share it because it supports their cause, regardless if it is true or not.
In the example above, the meme was designed to appeal to supporters of President Trump. It reinforced and supported what they already believe, or want to believe. So, a lot of people simply shared it with others.
But, none of us are safe. This isn’t just a tactic used against Conservatives. There are memes that elicit a similar response in Liberals.
Someone is creating these memes and whoever is creating them knows that they’re inaccurate. It’s easy for me to imagine an office in China where people are tasked with creating memes for distribution in the U.S. The goal of the office is to distribute false information and increase the divide between Liberals and Conservatives. There may not be such an office but it is really easy to imagine that there is so. Regardless of who is creating the memes or for what reason, we should all be fighting to minimize the damage they cause.
I’m not a fan of Kamala Harris. In fact, I think she’s a very bad person. Personally, I wish the quotes showed above are accurate because I believe they show who she truly is. It would have been easy for me to simply click “like” or “share” because the meme reinforced what I already believed. But I didn’t.
Instead of helping to propagate a lie, it’s more important to me that I help to spread the truth. And it should be to you too.
