Topic for discussing and investigating misquotes.
Misquotes are a common problem, not a rare problem. See e.g. Misquotes by David Deutsch and my Scholarship blog category (which points out or investigates misquotes and factual errors).
In Distribute the Future, Pueyo opens with a quote:
“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” —William Gibson
I was a little bit suspicious so I was going to do a web search to check if the quote was real. But then I saw he’d given a source link on the author’s name. Great. It goes here:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
Which is a “Quote Investigator” article about that specific quote! Great! The guy checked if it was a myth before using it.
The quote investigator says Gibson said similar things but some wordings are inexact. OK. And it gives some versions Gibson did say and that people quote him as having said.
But the wording Pueyo used, with that page as his source, does not appear on the page a single time. Pueyo apparently made up his own wording and gave a “source” link that doesn’t contain or mention that wording.
Pueyo looked up whether it was a real quote, found a webpage about it, found out there was some wording flexibility for the quote … and still unambiguously misquoted.
Related to misquotes, TikTok bans people from posting comments for putting source links in comments for facts or quotes:
https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey/video/6988981057760595205
The issue is presumably about links in general rather than source links. Though source links might get treated worse because they’ll often be obscure links that no one else is posting. I’m guessing if you share a link that many other people are sharing, or link to a major website, you’re unlikely to get in trouble.
Taking video clips egregiously out of context is a misquoting issue – spreading misinformation about what someone actually said while pretending to be providing an accurate repetition of their own words.
I think it was the white house that misquoted the hockey player cuz they literally tried quote him but came out with something incorrect. The hockey player didn’t actually say that from what I can tell.
I see the news also quoted the hockey player too so maybe they could end up misquoting him
Also, I don’t think the ai onlyt misquoted the hockey player, I think it did something worse. I think it put words in the hockey player’s mouth.
I think misquotes matter cuz they could start off a conversation badly, like instead of talking about the topic and moving forward, it makes things difficult to start. I think it’s more difficult to start cuz how much about the quote is the reader now misunderstanding while talking about the topic?
You mean it’s a fake video instead of just a text misquote?
Or a conversation never happens because someone has a negative opinion of someone else due to a misquote. They may not be open to discussing anything and there may be no way to correct the error.
Yeah, I thought there was a technical way describe that. I thought the video maybe only changed the hockey player’s words and the footage was actually real. I didn’t watch the fake video.
Maybe putting words in one’s mouth may not be the correct phrase here?
Wow i didnt think there would be no way to correct the error like that. I thought there always was a way to correct an error. But since the person isn’t even willing to discuss then that’s going to make correcting the error very difficult.
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