Once in 2020, I made an Instagram story post in support of communism. Since only so much information can be put into a single picture, I used multiple stories to convey my idea.

Among one of them, I posted a picture highlighting the deaths under Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong. I posted it to point out the mistakes by those leaders because of which it occurred, and suddenly one of my followers screenshotted that story and posted it on his story, with my username displayed. And he posted it saying that "communism is responsible for all these deaths", making it seem like I was against communism, when I was in fact in favour of the same. Any viewer of his story would've thought that I was against communism.

So I asked him to please mention that it's not my point, and then he just posted another story telling that only the original story was by me, and the added message was his. This still wouldn't let a viewer know that I intended to convey something else entirely.

That is when I knew that words could be taken totally out of context, not just to argue against someone, but also to convince that someone is on the other side of an opinion.

If we recall the speech by Rhodes in Iron Man 2, both aspects were presented as the same side of the coin, but most of us only notice how Rhodes' speech was taken out of context by the Senator to argue against Tony, not that had Tony not understood what Rhodes intended, he would've felt that he betrayed him. But in the movie that does not happen because Rhodes is Tony's friend and he also tries to explain the rest, and Tony is intelligent enough to understand the situation.

In real life however, we might be seen as betraying the same people we stood for, just because we made a holistic critical analysis the net sum of arguments which was always in their favour.

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