I have to tell on myself: I did something I constantly tell others to avoid — I started sharing (verbally, not online) a claim I saw in a post on social media without verifying the information.
So this is my mea culpa, and I’m hoping that sharing it will help others not make the same mistake.
The post I saw was shared by Richard Ojeda — a name I vaguely recognized as being associated with regional politics — on Facebook, and his account had a blue “verified” checkmark. It was a screenshot of a social media post with the user’s name and profile picture blacked out. (See below.)
The text reads (with its errors): “Results have already started. This is from an american woman today: My husband works for a small manufacturing company and here in southwestern PA that means most employees are Trump voters. When the president of the company sat them down today to tell them their annual Christmas bonus would not come this year because they now need to purchase at least a years worth of products prior to January 21st due to the proposed tariffs, they did not understand. My husband said that their president had to explain what a tariff is and how it will directly hurt their company. They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff. This is the level of ignorance voting against their own interests here in PA, where we failed American women and children last night”
I did not share the post online (I rarely share things on social media), but I had told a couple people about what I had read before I decided to check on its veracity. A quick Google search easily pulled up a Snopes fact check that says the claim is unfounded.
“Unfounded” means the source material — in this case, the original post that was screenshotted — can’t be found to verify the claims. The same screenshot shared on Reddit was alternately claimed to originate on Bluesky and/or on YouTube, but fact checkers could not find the original post on either website.
This isn’t the same as “false,” where something is demonstrably untrue, but it’s still a reason to be very careful about sharing it, because there’s a high likelihood it’s made-up or deliberate misinformation. Snopes refers to this particular post as “copypasta”: “copied-and-pasted text shared online” that are common in misinformation campaigns.
I’m pretty media savvy, so how did I fall for it?
First, I recognized the name of the person sharing it. I knew Richard Ojeda was involved in politics, but I thought he was a Pennsylvania politician, since he was sharing something about Pennsylvania. Turns out, he’s a heavily left-leaning West Virginia politician. Here in Morgantown, we are considered part of the Pittsburgh market, so one or two of our “local” news channels (ABC, NBC and/or CBS), depending on your cable provider, broadcast out of Pittsburgh. This means we receive a mix of West Virginia and Pennsylvania political ads, so it was easy for me to assume I recognized his name from Pennsylvania ads.
So I had two faults on this front: One, I wrongly assumed he was representing the state the post was about, and two, I fell for the authority bias, trusting that, as a politician, he knew what he was talking about.
Second, I found this post highly plausible: My confirmation bias led me to accept it without verifying first.
One thing I do know for sure is that Donald Trump and his allies have been lying about how tariffs work. His campaign repeatedly framed tariffs as something that foreign entities pay, when tariffs are an expense that gets paid by the consumer because the companies pass that expense on by raising the price. And, let’s be honest, most of us had no idea what tariffs were until Trump made them a centerpiece of his campaign.
And as someone who was a teenager during the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath, I saw firsthand how companies prioritized protecting themselves and their bottom lines over protecting their employees.
Taken altogether, that made it easy for me to believe this supposed manufacturing plant would take away Christmas bonuses in order to save money on supplies and the workers — supposedly Trump supporters — didn’t understand how tariffs work.
Third, as I said in my last post, there’s a part of me that is pettily waiting for Trump voters to experience the ramifications of their decision — especially the ones who voted for him “because of the economy.” So I wanted to see evidence of people who voted for Trump facing the consequences of their actions, and this post seemed to provide that.
And that, dear readers, is how I, as media literate as I am, fell for what is likely a deliberate misinformation campaign that is going viral on social media.
I should have double-checked the information in the post before sharing what I’d read, and that was my biggest mistake.
I’ve learned my lesson, and I hope you’ll learn from it, too.
J. Nelson - Writer 