Misquoted Facebook status becomes misattributed quote in mere keystrokes

Anatomy of a Fake Quotation – Megan McArdle – National – The Atlantic.

All it took was one misunderstanding and the deletion of a couple of quotation marks for one Facebook status update to become a quote widely misattributed to Martin Luther King on thousands of Twitter feeds and Facebook statuses.

That, and the lopping off of the actual words Dr. King said, in order to fit within Twitter’s 140-character limit.

In the above article, an Atlantic blogger traces how, really quite innocently, the quote was altered and memed and repeated all over the Internet. And how a modicum of research and fact checking made it right again.