Reposting a Note About Reposting
When friends share a meme, rant, political dirt, or mic-drop, it's as tempting to hit the share button as it is to share some juicy gossip. Jordi Morgan shares why you might press pause on that post.
See, it’s funny because I’m reposting a note from a friend about why you maybe shouldn’t repost notes from friends.
My grandmother liked to say, “If you can’t say something nice about someone… come sit by me.” She was being funny. She wasn’t a gossip, not in the malicious sense, but a huge portion of her time was spent sharing information about the goings and doings of a community of family, friends and neighbors.
We’re taught from Sunday school and HR handbooks that gossip is bad. But when researchers actually studied gossip—empirically, in the wild, or under lab conditions—they found something surprising:
Most gossip isn’t bad at all.
A landmark 2019 study from the University of California, Riverside, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, analyzed over 10,000 instances of gossip from people wearing electronic recorders during daily life.
Only about 14% of gossip was negative.
75% was neutral—things like “Did you hear Steve got a new job?”
The remaining 11% was positive.
Another 2006 study in Review of General Psychology made a similar point: gossip is a way we share social information, enforce norms, and connect emotionally. It's basically social currency.
Gossip is a social tool—sometimes shallow, sometimes wise, sometimes indispensable. Some of the time, gossip is more accurately a kind of breach of confidentiality. But it can be worse. Generally, researchers define “bad” gossip as:
Malicious or reputation-damaging talk, often with the goal of exclusion or harm.
Inaccurate or speculative information that spreads false narratives.
It’s not that we gossip too much. It’s that we rarely think hard enough about how we do it. And that’s where social media and the meaning of Bullshit comes in. Social media is giving gossip a bad name.
To help, this week Jordi Morgan wrote out a set of filters folks could use before pressing that share button on social media.
I love a decision tree, and I think very highly of Jordi, so I wrote to him to talk about his experience at the coal face of politics and asked if I could repost his post about not reposting.
Jordi’s not just a wise friend. He’s a professional with a lifetime working at the frontlines of this kind of trouble. He’s a super communicator, policy advocate, and broadcaster whose career has been deeply intertwined with the civic and economic life of Nova Scotia and Canada. Over nearly four decades, I’ve watched him consistently champion ideas and initiatives aimed at enhancing public discourse, understanding politics, and supporting small businesses.
For me, he was the face of CBC’s Newsworld — an important Canadian effort I really miss. His tenure in media saw him travel the dial in talk radio.
Geoff Smart, in his wonderful book Leadocracy asked that leaders like you commit to spending at least a term in public service in your lives. Jordi has done that and then some, from Deputy Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition and as Director of Parliamentary Affairs to the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. His roles often focused on media training and strategic communications, reflecting his expertise in these areas.
It also meant a lot to me building a local company from scratch when Jordi spent nearly decade-long tenure as Vice President for Atlantic Canada at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), where he advocated for the interests of small businesses across the region.
Today, Jordi Morgan Communications offers strategic counsel in media relations and public affairs — his mature role as a key figure in shaping public policy and discourse in Atlantic Canada.
Jordi's enduring dedication to public life and his efforts to foster informed dialogue continue to make a significant impact on Nova Scotia and beyond.
This post from Jordi Morgan is a timely and thoughtful reminder about our personal responsibility in the digital public square.
In spite of any political leanings I may have, I’ve always made a determined effort to ensure what I have said on podcasts, traditional media or social media had some sense of balance and veracity.
40 years in media and 25 in politics has taught me that it’s best-practice to use journalistic principles before reposting or repurposing someone else’s content.
As everyone is keenly aware, there is a hurricane of bullshit blowing around right now. Not necessarily lies, just bullshit. There’s a difference.
Lies are intended to mislead.
Bullshit is conjecture and/or uninformed opinion or comment loosely based on confirmation biases and congenial truths which distract from reality.
Because the amount of nonsense being reposted has now reached epidemic proportions, I felt compelled to offer this.
Before reposting someone else’s work,
1. Know the source and find an additional source or two to verify and ensure authenticity. Check to see if they have an agenda or advocacy position.
2. Look for a credibile counterfactual. A good shortcut is to check Snopes, or other online fact-checkers, they are doing some pretty good homework, including picking up the phone and calling sources directly.
3. Before hitting send, ask yourself if you would feel confident defending whatever you are posting as verifiable, face-to-face, with someone you respect.
4. My final test is, asking myself if I’m adding value to the information stream or just emotionally venting. In other words, is putting this into the public square really helpful?
We all share a responsibility to do something about stemming the tide of the misinformation by not unwittingly becoming a part of a larger problem.
Taking a beat to test Jordi’s four filters would seldom lead you and all the people who look to you for sober thought astray.
Jordi’s four filters will almost always ensure gossip never goes bad. And it’s even more important online.
This filtering effort has to be left to us. No amount of good intentions from leaders or the media could compensate for ignorance and apathy among citizens. No amount of rules and regulations from government or industry can stop bullshit — we must do it for ourselves.
I was particularly interested in Jordi’s distinction between Lies and Bullshit. It is crucial in gossip.
So what is the difference between lies and bullshit.
Bullshit travels fast. Faster than fact-checkers, faster than debate rebuttals, faster than lies. It’s cheaper to produce, easier to repeat, harder to catch, and instantly satisfying—especially in the dopamine den of TikTok, Facebook, and X.
In the current election cycle, we’re not drowning in lies. We’re choking on bullshit.
A lie would be saying Mark Carney wants to tax your lawnmower.
Bullshit is a meme of Carney in a suit made of $100 bills, captioned: "Central Banker of the Apocalypse."
One pretends to know something false. The other doesn’t care if it’s true, false, or even coherent. And it spreads because it feels true to the tribe.
I think, on the internet and social media, as in life, there’s far more bullshit than lies. Lies — like knowingly malicious lies — are actually pretty rare in day to day life, and, though we all eventually come across them, they are rare enough that I agree with Malcolm Gladwell in his book TALKING TO STRANGERS, when he concludes that in general humans are predisposed believers of truth and we should strive to stay that way.
But bullshit is another story.
Bullshit proliferates not just because of bad actors, but because of unreflective speakers—those who speak without knowing, out of obligation or impulse, or worst of all, performance. Sound familiar?
In the current election cycle, average citizens, influencers, and even legacy media have become unwilling bullshit amplifiers. Not because they're malicious. Because they're incentivized to pass things along before checking, reflecting, or reframing.
If you pause to verify a meme, the moment passes. If you nuance a post, the algorithm ignores you. If you hesitate, someone more confident—though no more correct—wins the space.
So bullshit wins not because it’s better. But because it’s faster.
In his mighty philosophical pamphlet masquerading as a book, ON BULLSHIT, Harry Frankfurt’s central thesis is famously simple but piercing: bullshit is not the same as lying. The liar still cares about the truth—they want to hide it. Liars are in the same game as truth tellers, just on opposite teams. But the bullshitter? They’re indifferent. They’re performing. They don’t care whether what they say is true or false, only that it works—for attention, for persuasion, for vibes. The bullshiter is transmitting a secondary message, a Trojan horse of information. They don’t care at all about the truth or falsity of the actual words. It’s the secondary message that concerns them.
The problem is — and this is especially true on social media — liars at least acknowledge that the truth matters. Because of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
The book explains that one of the most prominent features of our world is that there is so much bullshit in it. Yet we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, how it’s distinct from lying, what functions it serves, and what it means. Frankfurt, one of the world’s most influential moral philosophers, explores this important subject, which has become a central problem of politics and our world.
In the age of social media politics, meme warfare has overtaken policy debate, and the Canadian federal election has become a masterclass in Frankfurtian bullshit. On all sides, parties and their media allies (official and otherwise) aren’t necessarily lying. They're not even bothering to make things up. They’re just saying whatever sounds right to their people, untethered from concern about whether it’s accurate, useful, or even comprehensible.
Take a common style of campaign meme:
A pixelated Carney photo, red-filtered like a Netflix villain, overlaid with “HE’S A LIAR.”
Or Poilievre, laser eyes blazing, promising to “Axe the Tax” while housing prices continue their hockey stick impersonation.
Neither image lies, strictly speaking. But both are BS—because neither cares about what’s true. They care about what feels like truth to their tribe. They're performative assertions—truthiness over truth, persuasion over precision.
Frankfurt’s bullshitter “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.” He’s on the side of himself.
In this way, memes are perfect bullshit delivery systems.
What Frankfurt feared most wasn’t deception—it was a society that loses its sense of what it means to care about the truth at all. And if you've scrolled the comment threads lately, you know we’re dancing on that edge.
Canadians, like people everywhere, are less often being lied to than they are being worn down—exhausted by half-truths, tribal slogans, and confidence without competence.
And because we’re polite, we hesitate to call it out. But Frankfurt wouldn’t hesitate. He’d name it. He’d tell us: the country is not being misled. It’s being bullshitted.
A Canadian federal election should be a moment of national introspection, not a stage for weaponized indifference.
Frankfurt didn’t offer a magic solution, but he warned that bullshit thrives when people stop caring about whether what they say is true. That’s our danger now. It’s not just about media literacy or better fact-checking. It’s about reviving the idea that truth matters, even when it's boring, inconvenient, or doesn't own the Libs with that meme, mean tweet, or micdrop.
In the 1950’s Adm. H.G. Rickover wrote more politely and probably more profoundly than I have here. He said the most important aspect of a real education — nd one no longer taught in school today in a way that respects this primacy of place — is, in Rickover’s words:
To learn some kind of critical or intellectual method. I regard this as the most important of all. We have all learned that we live in an age of an information explosion. But we are also in the middle of a misinformation explosion. With the proliferation of mass communications media, we are surrounded by hawkers, pitchman, hard and soft sells, persuaders hidden and overt. Bombarded daily with millions of words by print and electronic media, we all have to have some kind of critical method by means of which to decide whom and what to believe, and to what degree.
How is this propaganda evaluated? It cannot always be analyzed by scientific method, since propagandistic statements are rarely capable of proof; but it can be approached with a scientific attitude. Some kind of discipline in the orientations of science is necessary to inculcate a critical attitude towards words, our own as well as those of others, so that our lives may be governed by skepticism an respect for fact that characterize the rational mind.
Jordi’s filters are a simple CRITICAL METHOD, a scientific approach, using Rickover’s terminology, for evaluating propagandistic statements in the misinformation age by cultivating curiosity, care for the truth, and good character among citizens.
Before reposting someone else’s work,
1. Know the source and find an additional source or two to verify and ensure authenticity. Check to see if they have an agenda or advocacy position.
2. Look for a credibile counterfactual. A good shortcut is to check Snopes, or other online fact-checkers, they are doing some pretty good homework, including picking up the phone and calling sources directly.
3. Before hitting send, ask yourself if you would feel confident defending whatever you are posting as verifiable, face-to-face, with someone you respect.
4. My final test is, asking myself if I’m adding value to the information stream or just emotionally venting. In other words, is putting this into the public square really helpful?
We all share a responsibility to do something about stemming the tide of the misinformation by not unwittingly becoming a part of a larger problem.