Polls | Gaza | Fact Checker | Support Us
Sign In | Join Free |
UK FACT CHECK POLITICS

UK FACT CHECK POLITICS

 Voting intention Labour Lab 27% Reform Ref 24% Con Con 22% Lib Dem LD 10% Green Grn 9% Poll tracker
Menu
Categories
Latest
Support Us
Search Articles
About
Get Involved
Account
Follow Us

**Image context:** A classic internet meme featuring a black-and-white portrait photograph of Abraham Lincoln on the left side, with white text on a black background on the right. The joke is that Lincoln, who died long before the internet existed, could not have said this quote — illustrating the very point the "quote" makes.

Image Upload 09 August 2026 at 17:06 Image / Meme Fact Check

Uploaded Image

Uploaded image for fact checking

Transcribed Text

**Image context:** A classic internet meme featuring a black-and-white portrait photograph of Abraham Lincoln on the left side, with white text on a black background on the right. The joke is that Lincoln, who died long before the internet existed, could not have said this quote — illustrating the very point the "quote" makes. **Transcribed text:** "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it." —Abraham Lincoln *Watermark (bottom right):* WeKnowMemes
42/100
Verdict Low Trust Satirical Misattribution — Attribution False, Underlying Advice Sound

The image is a well-documented 'troll quote' meme: a portrait of Abraham Lincoln paired with the line 'Don't believe everything you read on the Internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it.' The attribution is factually impossible.

✓ 4 checks out ✕ 1 disputed ? 3 unverified
☰ Full analysis The complete summary ⌄

The image is a well-documented 'troll quote' meme: a portrait of Abraham Lincoln paired with the line 'Don't believe everything you read on the Internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it.' The attribution is factually impossible. Lincoln died on 15 April 1865, more than a century before any public internet existed (ARPANET's first message: 29 October 1969; the World Wide Web went public on 6 August 1991). No such statement appears in the Lincoln corpus, and the quote is catalogued by Know Your Meme under the 'Troll Quotes' entry and referenced by Snopes as a 'memetic admonition'. Crucially, the item is self-aware satire: the joke is precisely that the quote is fake, and the advice it conveys (verify quotes attributed to historical figures) is sound and is endorsed in substance by professional fact-checkers. The trust score is therefore mid-range: the literal attributive claim is False, while the communicative intent is non-deceptive and the underlying counsel is accurate. Secondary details — the specific photograph used, the earliest datable appearance of the meme, and the role of the 'WeKnowMemes' watermark — could not be confirmed to primary-source standard and are marked Unverified.

What checked out (4)
  • VERIFIED: Abraham Lincoln died on 15 April 1865 at 7:22 a.m., after being shot the previous evening at Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth — confirmed by Ford's Theatre (primary custodian institution), the Library of Congress Abraham Lincoln Papers, and Britannica.
  • VERIFIED: The internet post-dates Lincoln's death by over a century. The first ARPANET message was sent on 29 October 1969 from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute; the World Wide Web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989 and made publicly available on 6 August 1991.
  • VERIFIED: The image belongs to a recognised meme genre. Know Your Meme catalogues multiple uploads of this exact Lincoln image under its 'Troll Quotes' origin entry, and Snopes explicitly refers to the 'memetic admonition -- frequently attributed to Abraham Lincoln -- not to trust quotes one finds on the internet'.
  • VERIFIED: The implicit meta-claim of the meme — that quotes paired with portraits online are frequently fabricated — is corroborated by fact-checking bodies. FactCheck.org searched The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln and found no trace of a widely circulated 'exiled or hanged' quote, and the Civil War Monitor notes the Collected Works devotes roughly 161 pages to listing forgeries, spurious and dubious items attributed to Lincoln.
✕ Disputed claims 1 claim ⌄
  • FALSE: 'Abraham Lincoln said or wrote: Don't believe everything you read on the Internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it.' This is chronologically impossible (death 1865 vs. internet 1969/1991) and is confirmed as a misattribution by multiple reputable sources with dates, including Snopes (14 December 2023 fact-check referencing the memetic quote) and Medium/Kate McClare (20 December 2019). The word 'Internet' in this sense did not exist in Lincoln's lifetime. Note: the falsity is intentional and openly self-referential, i.e. satire rather than disinformation.
? Unverified claims 3 claims ⌄
  • UNVERIFIED: The precise identity, photographer and date of the black-and-white Lincoln portrait used in the meme. No image-forensics or reverse-image search was possible in this environment; Wikipedia's 'List of photographs of Abraham Lincoln' exists but could not be matched to the specific crop.
  • UNVERIFIED: The earliest datable appearance and original creator of this specific meme. Circulation is evidenced from at least the mid-2010s (Know Your Meme uploads dated 13 February 2015 and later; Pinterest pin dated 16 December 2016), but no archived first instance with a verifiable timestamp was located. One low-authority blog dates it to 'the early 2000s' — that claim is uncorroborated and should not be relied upon.
  • UNVERIFIED: The evidential significance of the 'WeKnowMemes' watermark. WeKnowMemes is a real meme aggregation and generation site (weknowmemes.com, with an associated X account active since at least 2011 and a Facebook page), but aggregator watermarks indicate redistribution, not authorship; no source confirms WeKnowMemes originated this image.
⌕ Sources & how we checked Search journal, source grades, confidence ⌄
Confidence

High (0.92) — Confidence is high on the decisive question — the attribution's falsity — because it rests on an incontrovertible chronological impossibility corroborated by primary institutional sources (Ford's Theatre, Library of Congress, IEEE ETHW) and dated reputable secondary fact-checks (Snopes 2023, FactCheck.org 2006, Civil War Monitor 2025), well above the guardrail threshold. Confidence is deliberately withheld on peripheral matters — the meme's origin date, its creator, and the specific photograph — which remain Unverified owing to the absence of reverse-image search and web-archive access in this environment; these gaps do not affect the core verdict, hence 0.92 rather than higher or lower. A residual caveat: several indexed pages displayed anomalous future dates, so they were used only as corroboration of settled historical facts and never as sole support.

Search journal

Abraham Lincoln "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet" meme origin

Abraham Lincoln misattributed quote internet meme fact check

Abraham Lincoln died April 15 1865 assassination Ford's Theatre

Know Your Meme Troll Quotes origin Lincoln internet quote

ARPANET 1969 first message internet origin history

World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee 1989 proposal 1991 public

WeKnowMemes website meme aggregator

Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln searchable spurious quotations Lincoln never said

Quote Investigator "believe everything you read on the internet" Lincoln

snopes Abraham Lincoln internet quote meme

"just because there's a picture with a quote next to it" Lincoln 2010 2011 earliest

Article metrics

Emotion 5% · Reading grade 9.9 · 80 words

≡ The article we checked Full text as retrieved ⌄
**Image context:** A classic internet meme featuring a black-and-white portrait photograph of Abraham Lincoln on the left side, with white text on a black background on the right. The joke is that Lincoln, who died long before the internet existed, could not have said this quote — illustrating the very point the "quote" makes. **Transcribed text:** "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it." —Abraham Lincoln *Watermark (bottom right):* WeKnowMemes

Share this fact check

← Check another article or image