As a skeptic, it is often troubling to see the amount of bogosity available in public, much less the Internet, where anyone with some free time can offer advice, and many people just eat them up, with absolutely zero due diligence about the veracity of the information received. It doesn't help when social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on help (inadvertently) spread the misinformation.
Recently, a post on Slate documented how the subreddit /r/askHistorians struggle to control the deliberate misinformation campaign by Holocaust deniers, and how social media, afraid of lawsuits, basically left them to say ANYTHING they wanted. Fortunately, that subreddit has a crew of volunteer moderators that use the banhammer when it was called for.
And what they found about Holocaust deniers applies to ALL sorts of deniers, such as antivaxxers, pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme proponents, and so on. You should go read the article yourself, as I will only be discussing their findings. Deniers generally use these tactics:
1) Cite bogus experts who are proven to have ignored facts that did not fit their narrative, or experts who had nothing to do with their field, but merely sympathetic to their field.
Holocaust deniers cite David Irving and Fred Leuchter
Antivaxxers cite Andrew Wakefield, Bob Sears, and Mercola.
Scam proponents cite their own leader(s) or uplines
2) Cite minor mistakes in citings and frame it as "Just Asking Questions"
Otherwise known as "JAQing off", this technique requires a lot of effort to dispell since there are an infinite amount of details they can focus on while sounding earnest, usually by leaving out the context of the question.
Holocaust deniers deny fundamental facts about the Holocaust, such as the number of deaths, whether Nazis have a campaign of extermination, and so on.
Antivaxxers are well known to deny that vaccines work at all, whether vaccines have eradicated most infectious diseases, and even deny that some infectious diseases are deadly.
Scam proponents are well known to deny their scheme is a scam, often even AFTER the scam had been shut down by authorities. They will often deny pyramid scheme by obfuscating-conflating it with "pyramid organization".
Attempting to engage them by doing the research does not appease them, but instead, waste a TON of time. They are NOT interested in the facts. Their questions, seemingly innocent, casts doubt on the facts: "if they didn't get this 100% right, what else did they get wrong?"
When normal people cannot distinguish between arguments and blatant falsehoods, attempting to dispel falsehood with truth does not work. This is worse when existing social media shows you news that you are interested in, which means it will TILT the engagements toward sources you like, not the sources that tell the truth.
And it certainly didn't help when the President of the United States, Donald Trump, tweets "fake news!" about our news organizations every time there are news that he'd disagree with.
The only real way to deal with denialists is to DENY them a place to speak. They are welcome to start their own platforms if they want to talk about themselves in their own echo chamber, but there is no room for them in serious and honest discussions. And if they choose to invoke conspiracy theories, let them to promote insular thinking, let them.
But when denialists deny facts, there is no "discussing" things with them. Facts are facts. It's much like science... It's true whether you believe it or not (as said by Neil DeGrasse Tyson).
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