If you can’t quite wrap your head around the Tumblr history fact that you used to be able to change the text of someone else’s post when reblogging it…

Consider.

You also used to be able to change Twitter posts when retweeting them– because “retweet” used to be just copy-pasting someone else’s tweet and adding “RT” and their username. People who wanted a lot of RTs would consciously choose to leave space in the character limit for it. If they didn’t, even their most faithful fans might edit their text, just because they had to make it fit. (Character limit was 140 back then, and I think usernames even counted toward it at first.)

And before Twitter and Tumblr and other “modern” social media, we had email lists. Quoting someone there meant just leaving the original email text from the email you were replying to. It was distinguished from your replies only with carets at the beginnings of the lines, and was totally editable. It looked like this:

ALT

and if you edited it, it could look like this:

ALT

…but this sort of editing didn’t HAPPEN very often.

because 1. if you want to be snarky at someone it’s usually easier and less obviously childish to just snark in your reply, and 2. if you want to distort what someone else said for purposes of misinformation, it’s ridiculously ineffective to do it in a chain of emails where everyone can just go back and check on what was originally said.

And you know what? Before email lists, there were paper letters you got in the mail. And if someone wanted to “repost” and mail you a letter they’d gotten from someone else, either 1. they had to mail you that original letter and not have it anymore, or 2. they had to have a copying machine, or 3. the letter had to have originally been written on carbon paper to produce triplicate copies of it (that’s what “CC” means, carbon copy) or 4. they had to just write down what the other letter said, and you had to just trust or not trust them about how faithfully they were transcribing it.

And before postal mail, people just talked. And again you had to make your own judgments about how accurately they quoted what they’d heard from anyone.

tl;dr: Being able to edit quotes from other people is the default state of the world, and technology that tries to convince you it’s impossible by default will end up atrophying your fact-checking skills if you’re not careful to watch out for that.

(Just one more way the computers and the programs start thinking and the people stop.)