It’s why they spend so much time charging one another about what the facts are, and so often accuse their colleagues of hiding or distorting them. In this case, the image was debunked by somebody we would expect to be on the same side as those passing this around, the liberal blogger Alex Seitz-Wald, which shows an important point: even the most partisan and ideological members of the political media care about accuracy and maintaining a reputation of trustworthiness. But somebody decided it looked like the official wanding him was actually shining his shoes, so another meme predicated on misinformation was born. This Mitt Romney photo is a Getty image from 2008 of the presidential candidate going through airport security before boarding a plane. The chart had already been discredited by political fact-check blogs many months before it appeared on Facebook. These two memes are among the most widely shared by liberals, and they’re both wildly inaccurate. That’s exactly the sort of thing that becomes a Facebook political meme, albeit even more poorly made and less likely to be factual.

It’s telling that the only political item on Facebook’s top 40 “most shared” news article list of 2011 was a blurry, resized infographic of debatable accuracy one newspaper’s blogger had taken off another newspaper’s website.

And unfortunately, the shared content here is just as shoddy as what Facebook’s users did to poor Betty White, but potentially much more damaging.ĭespite Facebook sponsoring presidential debates, interviewing newsmakers, and commissioning opinion polls, keeping up the appearances of an important American institution and serious media organization concerned with good civic values, the prevailing political discourse is still as rotten to its core as any Facebook meme. But its seedy meme underbelly is perhaps where the real and most consequential activity occurs. Politics page demonstrates the site to be home to high-minded voter-to-voter conversation and crucial interaction between elected officials and their constituents. By highlighting the best material, Facebook’s U.S.

Whats wrong im fine meme