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In 2020 and 2021, social media users enthusiastically shared a copy-and-paste, biblically-inspired tract about the cashless society being a harbinger of the apocalypse. For reasons that are unclear, Facebook users began in August and September 2021 to attribute the diatribe to Tim Tebow, the free agent tight end who became a household name in the 2010s as a first-round NFL draft pick for the Denver Broncos and an outspoken conservative Christian. The screenshot below shows just a selection of examples of the cashless society message on Facebook, and demonstrates its enormous popularity on that platform: The post typically came with the introduction Tim Tebow posted this morning, along with the following message: Despite extensive research, Snopes has not yet been able to identify the author of the diatribe, or the forum in which it was first published. However, we can confirm it was not composed by Tebow. After this fact check was originally published, a representative for the former Heisman Trophy winner confirmed for Snopes that Tim Tebow did not author this. As a result, we are changing our rating from Unproven to False. Even before we obtained confirmation from Tebow's representative that he did not write the message, good reasons existed to doubt his authorship of it. The earliest instance of the apocalyptic cashless society meme that we could find was a July 8, 2020, Facebook post by Steve Tickle, who featured in the Discovery Channel reality TV show Moonshiners. However, that post made no mention of Tebow: An unnamed person replying to an inquiry we sent through Tickle's website told Snopes he was not the original author of the message, and said I believe we copied that post from another site. In fact, tens of thousands of Facebook users shared the message for around a year, without any attribution, before Tebow's name began to be inserted. The earliest example of attribution to Tebow that we could find came in an Aug. 24, 2021, Facebook post. Past experience suggests that this phenomenon — where an already popular meme later becomes attributed to a celebrity — can often be a sign that the attribution is bogus. Snopes searched Tebow's social media profiles, his personal website and the website of the Tim Tebow Foundation, as well as an extensive news archive, and we could find no record of his ever having written or uttered the words contained in the viral message. In principle, this could have meant that the message was published and later deleted, but in fact, as later confirmed by Tebow's representative, it was because he never wrote or said those words in the first place. Tebow is a devout and vocal conservative Christian, and he regularly posts religious musings and biblical verses on social media, so the prospect of his having expressed the sentiments contained in the post was not inherently implausible. Indeed, this might be one of the reasons why his name was chosen to be erroneously attached to it.
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