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This Bernie Sanders meme shows you really can't believe everything you read on the internet

Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty
Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty

"With great power comes great responsibility."

No, that isn't just a quotation from Spider-Man: it's a mantra that must never be forgotten when posting on the internet.

Bernie Sanders' Democratic presidential candidacy campaign is built on his anti-establishment credentials, often calling for a "political revolution."

The following meme has been making its rounds on the internet, and there's something odd about it:

Well, he didn't actually say that.

The Unabomber did.

Picture: Federal Bureau of Investigation

As blogger Anne Thériault pointed out, the quote is actually an excerpt from the 35,000 word manifesto sent to The Washington Post and The New York Times by anarchist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the “Unabomber”, who engaged in a bombing campaign which killed three and injured 23 between 1978 -1995 in the US:

We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved... instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

The post Thériault appears to have been removed, but the meme has been floating around the internet for a few months. For example, this Facebook post using it has just under 10,000 shares, and is still online (and not everyone in the comments seems to be aware of its origin):

And the writer has some good advice: Google is your fact-checking friend.

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