Over the last couple months, I've seen an increasing number of headlines and YouTube videos scroll past that were of similar shapes ("Everything you know/knew/were told/people say about X is wrong", "Why is everybody complaining/so obsessed/claiming Y/... about X?") and every single time it's the first time I hear about X or it's asserted property.
The idea behind it is probably that you feel behind the curve because "everybody" is talking about X and you haven't even heard about it. So you click the link (or on Youtube: the angry-shouty-guys face) to learn about X. Enough people do it, and suddenly, everybody on social media is talking about X, or correcting each other that X actually isn't Y.
I didn't know it as a visual meme, more of an adage: don't reinforce your bombers where the ones that came back got hit. In other words, be aware of accidental bias on sampling, which could be so severe that it results in choices that are exactly wrong.
It comes with an anecdote, apparently, about a wartime mathematician named Abraham Wald, in which officers have the dumb idea of looking where the bullet holes are and Wald tells them they're wrong and "Wald’s recommendations were quickly put into effect", and this totally happened. But the blog tells us this never happened, and the armor was in the right place already.
So, I don't know, continue to be aware of accidental bias on sampling, except if you travel back in time to 1942 and you're put in charge of aircraft armor you shouldn't worry so much because you're basically doing the right thing. Yes. Also, people like exaggerating stories.
The author knows more about plane survivability than most, but couldn't see past the facts to understand the meaning.
Perhaps then, the moral is also a lie. Well, at least groundless until another story is invented to support it...
It's illustrating a point. The truth the meme demonstrates is still very real.
The word you're looking for is "fiction", and the moral of a story isn't diminished simply because the story is fictional. Parables, allegories, fables, myths, and fairy tales often contain truth despite not having actually happened. The opposite happens too, where the occasional real life anecdote is believed to contain some general truth despite being a one-off occurrence.
