Online friends have by now already heard me repeatedly beat the drum for the (apparently radical) notion that we have a civic duty to check the accuracy of political assertions before sharing them. Recently, I have been noticing the re-surfacing of a long-debunked false Theodore Roosevelt quote/meme, which strikes me as particularly telling: “To anger a Conservative, lie to him. To anger a Liberal, tell him the truth.” At the risk of restating the blindingly obvious: It would be funny if it weren’t so serious that the people posting this are claiming the mantle of honesty while spreading a lie.
When I saw this quote years ago, my first reaction was, “That does not seem at all like Teddy Roosevelt!” It took me only a few moments checking to confirm my suspicion that it was a false quote. My next thought was, “This doesn’t even make sense as a TR quip,” since the labels, “Conservative” and “Liberal”, had quite different meanings a century ago, not the warring-tribes connotation the terms carry today. Ironically, the people I saw posting this false quotation did it in the context of what they saw as being thoughtful, reasonable people, simply pointing out the obvious moral failings of those “other” people. (Even more dispiriting, though perhaps not surprising, is to have this false quote reappear in the age of Trump, where a very large majority self-described Conservatives express support for a President known his whole life for incessant lying.)
I want to be clear that I am not writing to debate the truth or not of the content of the quote, but rather to point out how credulously spreading the lie in its attribution serves as a memorable (and unintentionally self-indicting) example of what not to do in online discourse. It seems the fact-checkers have also noticed this particular quote popping up, as there are recent articles about it in both Politifact (https://www.politifact.com/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2019/mar/11/facebook-posts/no-teddy-roosevelt-never-said-quote-about-liberals/) and FactCheck.org (https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/unverified-teddy-roosevelt-quotation-lives-on/) as well as an older article in Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/teddy-roosevelt-anger-a-liberal-quote/). Personally, I find the whole idea that ideological tribes differ significantly in moral virtues like personal integrity to be extremely dubious, carrying a very heavy historical burden of proof after how often these convictions have been used to justify inhumane treatment of “those other people”.
Especially, with the next US election cycle beginning to ramp up, I believe it is crucial to remain mindful that disinformation is toxic to effective civic discourse in a democracy, and that we as citizens have an active responsibility not to contribute to the problem by failing to check the accuracy of the information we share online. The problem is age-old (“A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes”, also often falsely attributed: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/), but is more important than ever now with sophisticated, well-funded attempts to politically weaponize the tools of Social Media. In my own posts I strive to first check and then cite credible sources. I am asking others to do the same and to request the same of their friends, thereby spreading, I hope, a small ripple of increased veracity across the fabric of the Net. One can always dream.