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Why Bother to Debunk What’s Obviously False?
How much effort should you expend debunking a conspiracy theory?
When someone gives you obvious misinformation, you’re in a no-win situation.
You need to reject the information as false and possibly harmful. You need to tell the person you aren’t interested in joining their cult. You may feel obligated to persuade that person to abandon their idea — just as they feel obligated to persuade you to adopt it.
But you may be unable to achieve everything you want.
Lily Simpson compares how fact-checkers confront misinformation to how a farmer confronts a plague of locusts. You want to combat the locusts, but stomping one at a time is a losing strategy. The misinformer can pump out strings of nonsense words much faster than you can search and grab onto reality anchors.
Even if you can demonstrate the nonsense and persuade the person to take another path, you’ll be working on that project a very long time. Your day (and possibly your week or month) will be significantly disrupted. If their claim is something like “Aliens killed Julius Caesar,” how would you begin to explain why you believe that’s false? And why would you pause your important business to do so?
On the other hand, if you blow it off and keep walking, the conspiracy theorist will believe they’ve “won.” It may not matter if they are pleased with themselves and feel smugly superior to you, but it does matter if they are emboldened to continue to misinform others. If their theory is harmful (racist, anti-science, etc.), you don’t want them to feel they have renewed energy to keep promoting it. If you have a real opportunity to educate them, you may want to seize it, difficult and annoying though this task may be.
Understanding the Opponent
When Menachem Kaiser traveled to Poland to investigate the property that his grandfather had lost during World War II, he spoke to the treasure hunters of Nazi-era relics, and his initial inclination was to be quietly polite toward these people who were telling him about supposed Nazi time machines.
“Even to justify why I wan’t taking them seriously is in effect to take them seriously; I did believe…
