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?
