This could go multiple places, but seeing as that the election was laced with people who believed in this kind of thing I’ll put it here.
Watch this dust up over the pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Now read the comments. I assume people here, from what I’ve seen of you are not so quick to believe in such fantasy tales, and neither was Bryan Callen, but Eddie? And so many others are. How the hell do you fight back against that? Against a mind, against legions upon legions of minds that are so invested in a particular way of viewing the world and reality that they are naturally primed to believe in nonsense?
I haven’t looked much into the pizzagate stuff so cannot comment on it directly. What I shall say is that these conspiracies aren’t so far fetched. I do believe that having political power probably does protect you to an extent from these sorts of allegations. It’s probably no coincidence that the most high profile 2 or 3 pedophile politicians that I know of were not caught at the height of their political power, but discovered only after they died, retired, or lost political power. In one case here in the UK there certainly were rumours of pedophilia against an MP but his party leader is on record since as saying it wasn’t his job to believe the rumours. It’s easy to see how a party leader not wishing to believe a rumour of pedophilia against a political colleague can later be viewed by the public as indulging in a conspiracy to protect.
I suspect these CT debates involve some trolling, some grain of truth and some numbnuts. My main problem with the pizzagate stuff is that it seems to involve very young kids. I think if there is indeed a cabal of powerful people protecting each other with regards to sex it is a group of people who enjoy having sex with prostitutes & teenagers(Jeffrey Epstein types), a party apparatus who do little to uncover it, and at times sweep it all under the rug. I think for every pedophile there are many, many more individuals who like their sexual partners to be young-ish. We also know it’s not necessarily the job of party leaders to believe these rumours and allegations.
How do you fight it? You don’t. If I’m discussing politics or current events on Facebook and a friend pops up with something really weird, I rebut it once and then I’m done. The world is not full of these people, the vast majority will respond to an effective rebuttal. Not the person who posted the conspiracy theory usually, but usually everyone else reading the thread.
Just remember the rule of 20%: 20% of people believe Elvis is still alive. Plus 1 out of 3 people are mentally ill. Or maybe both of those are just bad facts someone got off the internet. If they are wrong(and they likely are), all you have to do is rebut them and I won’t believe them anymore. The vast majority of people will also cease to believe stupid shit if the rebuttal is effective. Those that don’t, stop trying.
The problem is that things aren’t always black and white. Some facts are indisputable. Some assertions are easily disproven. Then there are facts that are probably true, but might not be. Not everyone processes information in such a way as to be able to be good at judging what is likely to be true or unlikely to be true. There are also issues of hot button stories pushing our buttons. There is a moral panic around things like child sex rings and racism, so any stories about those things are likely to be believed even by people who would normally have healthy skepticism. CNN is complaining about fake news, yet breathlessly reporting every accusation against unknown Trump supporters supposedly intimidating minorities. Because even many reasonable people have been taught that their worst fears are true. There are child molestors and racists operating prostitution rings that target minorities on your block this very second!
But I digress. We need to be able to discuss things where the facts are not clear. You can’t apply the scientific method to politics. You can’t apply innocent until proven guilty to politics. One way that reasonable people don’t help is by simply calling fanciful stories “debunked” when they haven’t actually been.
It’s funny how a couple posts in this thread are living, breathing examples of the problem described in the OP. From Fuzzy’s “I’m not saying where there’s smoke there’s fire, but conspiracy theories are grounded in reality” to adaher’s “depends what the definition of is is” it seems to me that if smart people are to some degree disputing that fake news exists, we are all fucking doomed. Mike Judge should start disliking “Ignoracacy” right now.
The trouble is that every attempt to investigate rationally is going to be dismissed as part of the conspiracy if it doesn’t come up with the required answer - unless there’s such a backlash that the original source of the idea of the conspiracy is itself dismissed as a conspiracy. In the UK we saw something similar over a whole set of allegations of satanic child abuse rituals decades ago, even as genuine child abuse scandals were being overlooked, ignored or even dismissed as fantastical inventions, as is now coming home to roost.
Yet, on the other hand, we have the allegations of one source (that there was a high level conspiracy involving very senior political figures) that were first believed by the police and then discounted - and in one of those cases, I note (as no-one else seems to have commented on publicly) a similarity of name between one of those figures and someone completely different mentioned in the latest set of reports of individual (but not yet, it seems, a conspiratorial group) abusers in football - I wonder if the source of those original wild allegations had somehow picked up on something genuine and misunderstood what he heard?
It’s that sort of tangle that makes it so difficult to deal with. How to sort out the genuine from the malicious from the fantasists? As for how to persuade the people who aren’t remotely involved but just seem to believe any old nonsense… - I believe there are still flat-earthers and Holocaust-deniers and Illuminati-theorists around, and they will probably never just disappear. For all I know, someone’s beavering away still trying to prove phlogiston theory.
You’re asserting that a journalist who perhaps gets a story in error is exactly the same as an internet troll who fabricates entire conspiracies. I thought it was conservatives who derided “moral equivalence” of various actions.
Let’s forget the whole Internet phenomena of fake news. In 1996, media wrongly accused a security guard of the bombing at the Olympics, and media later exonerated him (much too late of course). In the 2000s, Jayson Blair of the NYT totally fabricated a number of stories. Are you saying that both incidents are fake news, and it is impossible to differentiate?
Given CNN’s proclivity for reporting hate crimes as something that definitely happened based solely on the testimony of the victim is not just accidentally getting a story wrong. That’s simply journalistic malpractice. Which of course is still better than someone just making up a story, so your point is well taken. It’s just not as black and white as the self-interested media would like to portray it. After all, they want to keep their old roles as gatekeepers, deciding what we will know and what we will think about it.
But even when they are being well meaning, they debunk stories all wrong. Instead of rating something true or false or half true when it comes to stories being reported outside the mainstream press, they should establish a “plausibility” scale. Say 1 means, “total bullshit, completely disproven”, 5 means, “this is totally true”, with ratings of 3 or 4 being, “quite possibly true, some evidence to support it, but still plenty of doubt.”
Because a lot of fake stories I get sent on social media turn out to be more plausible than the mainstream media likes to admit, and when they claim a story is debunked that isn’t it only reinforces the conspiracy theorists.
In fact, almost every Hillary Clinton scandal was in the 2-4 range of our 1-5 scale. From the Wall Street speeches to the emails, there was a lot of doubt. But in both cases, the doubt existed primarily because of her. So sure, nothing is proven absolutely true or false, but there was enough there for a solid 3, with her refusal to come clean being more than enough to get to 5 for many reasonable people.
That’s the terrifying thing: this conspiracy theory is, in fact, so far-fetched that it beggars belief that anyone with a modicum of sanity would believe it, and is so absurd and slapdash that it would only be comical (and is comical to many of the trolls participating in its creation and spread) if there were not very real, serious and dangerous consequences— and yet there are people willing to believe it, and many more who won’t rule it out as a possibility.
The peril we face if this lunacy continues can’t be overstated. In a Trump administration, a handful of mouth-breathing 4chan trolls could incite a global conflict just for the lulz.
This Bill Clintonesque line of argument - making this issue out to be so confusing when it really is not - is a disservice to the fundamental issue.
Whether some media outlets uphold the most rigorous standards of journalism - sourcing, reporting, editorializing, grammar, whatever - is a totally different discussion than people who literally fabricate entire stories as the entire point of writing the story. That is fake news. Fox News anchors being sexist to co-hosts is not fake news. MSNBC obsessing over every Trump tweet is not fake news. CNN panel discussions that feature only the dumbest conservatives is not fake news. The Washington Post misreporting crime statistics on guns is not fake news. Fake news is people making outrageous shit up in order to make money or achieve some political ends.
Conspiracy theories are a problem to be endured not solved. There have always been conspiracy theories JFK, MLK, the moon landing, crack cocaine, AIDS engineered, 911, Birth Certificate, and now Pizzagate.
They appeal to the mentally challenged and the paranoid and there are always plenty of those people around. The upside is you occasionally get a decent Seinfeld episode mocking the conspiracy theory.
Thank you. Fake news is a huge problem with no good solution, but what is even worse is that people are coming out and actually defending the use of fake news. And encouraging a “post-fact” society. WTF.
To me, it’s like the NRA saying that nobody could ever distinguish between a homeowner responding to a home invasion by discharging his firearm and unfortunately hitting an innocent bystander; and an American going nuts and spraying bullets into a crowd of children.
I mean, do we want the government to be in the position of splitting hairs like this?
It’s worse than that. It seems smarter and more intelligent people are even better and more prone to picking apart and rejecting false information if it conflicts with their ideology:
I don’t WANT Scott Adams to be right, that it’s all about peoples preferences and internal wants and nothing to do with rational calculations and neutral arguments. I want facts to matter, but it seems humanity has a built in aversion to such things, ourselves included.
I have my own example. I was arguing with a youtuber in comments who made a claim that there was widespread voter fraud in favor of Hillary Clinton (He was radically against her and in favor of Trump). I said it was bullshit. He responded with that video by James Okeefe showing some single guy talking about getting people out to vote, in some less than ideally legal ways.
I responded not with a totally fact based take down, but with a disbelief that even if such a lone example was a bad actor, that it was not the kind of thing that was widespread and would scale. The truth is I don’t really know the details of all sorts of different potential ground operations, so I had to go off of my own internal gut, and hearing that Hillary and only Hillary was engaged in widespread election fraud was not going to fly with me without some VERY powerful evidence, and James Okeefe, who I consider a conservative hack who does NOTHING but go on stings and capture hundreds if not thousands of hours of videos to find needle in hay stacks of liberals behaving badly did not constitute a credible source to me.
Perhaps this aversion to believing counter evidence to a world view and ideology is a human defense mechanism? People lie, people misrepresent reality, if all it took to sway someone was a glance at logically consistent “facts” that would point in one direction, but those facts were fabricated and wrong, then believing them without push back would not be an effective and worthwhile strategy.
But this kind of thinking empowers the liars and cheats of the world. David Frum said something interesting on Twitter regarding lies and fake news.
“They all lie” is a sentiment that most benefits the most egregious liars.
We all have ample evidence people lie in politics, the little white lies and bigger lies have piled up over the decades to create a scale of cynicism where we seem hyper invested in our own internal narratives and it is intrinsically harder to crack those shells.