system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How do we know that Plato accurately represents Socrates' opinions?

I was reading some answers on this lovely subreddit, and my copy of The Republic earlier, and I came to a thought "why do we assume that Plato accurately represents Socrates' views on anything?"

Plato was the one who wrote all of these things down, it makes no sense to me that we can assume anything written by him is accurately reflective, thus we should really be referring to Plato's opinion when we oftentimes say "Socrates said [insert quote here"

So, how do we know what is, and what wasn't Socrates' opinions?
gpt
Well, the short answer is that we don't know which opinions are Socrates' and which are Plato's. Socrates himself never wrote down his own opinions for us, so it all come down to how much we can trust what other people say about him.  The three contemporary-ish accounts of Socrates' philosophic practice and opinions come from Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon, and they all present him in rather different lights. Plato explicitly rejects Aristophanes' portrayal in the Apology, but then we're back to the same question: How much do we trust Plato? 

Within Plato's works, there's a shift in theoretical standpoint that happens over time. It's usually believed that the early dialogues better reflect Socrates' opinions, because they were written before Plato would have had the time to develop his own philosophical views. But this again doesn't really solve the main difficulty you're bringing up. If the early dialogues are closer to Socrates, just how close are they? We don't know. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that when people say "Socrates said [insert quote here]", they don't mean "The real-life historical Socrates said...". They mean "Socrates, the character from Plato, said..." It would just be irritating to have to say that explicitly every time.