Christ, how do you deal with this? A close family friend of mine keeps showing up in my news feed with alt-med, green hippie bullshit, and it’s really, really bothering me. This is an otherwise intelligent person. She works as a lawyer, she’s a mature woman with multiple children, she’s a lovely person who I hold a lot of respect for, and I know she’s not stupid. Pot-addled, sure, but not stupid. But fucking christ, no matter how many times I chime in noting “That article about how polio vaccines gave 98 million people cancer is complete bullshit” or “You do realize that just because fungicides are bad for bees doesn’t mean that they’re toxic for humans, right?”, or “No, the CDC did not just ‘slip up and accidentally tell the truth about chemotherapy’, that article is complete bullshit”. And I just don’t know what to do. I feel like an asshole every time I butt in and say, “this information is not only wrong, but it’s also potentially very harmful for anyone who reads it without the whole picture”, but at the same time I feel like I have a civic duty to not let bullshit like this stand unchallenged when I can. And I know this person isn’t an idiot, it’s just… Ugh. It sickens me to see crap like this spread around, and that virtually all of my adult friends where I used to live, most of whom I still hold in high regards, buy into this sort of thing.
I don’t know how to handle it, and I just feel like ranting, so… Yeah. Fuck all y’all. You wouldn’t know critical analysis of sources if it hit you with a fish wearing nothing but Dobby’s tea cozy. Your alt-med bullshit is dangerous and may very well be hurting those around you, and by spreading this sort of viral stupidity around, you’re acting as disease vectors for sick minds and sick bodies. Go get a fucking clue you stupid drugged-out hippies.
There are a few people who, due to long-lasting friendship or the fact that underneath it all they’re just really good people that I like having in my life, I keep around on Facebook even though they’re prone to posting woo.
Most woo purveyors get dropped like a hot rock, though. I just delete people who keep posting this bullshit. If it’s occasional, then I might post a debunking link and have a conversation about it. But if it’s constant? Nah, they’re just gone.
I take them out of my newsfeed. Especially if that is the bulk of their posts.
There are a few close friends who despite their constant woo/political postings or whatever, I keep in my news feed because once in a while they post something I enjoy seeing.
The solution is simple. Just go to www.naturalnews.com and read anything written by Mike Adams. I’m completely serious. Five minutes trawling through the nightmarish, batshit fever-dreams that pass for that guy’s “thoughts” and your friend will seem like a bastion of sanity by comparison.
The best way I’ve found to deal with it is by being cheerfully relieved that whatever myth they’ve posted turns out not to be true.
If you post some variant on ‘Of COURSE candy corn isn’t a government plot to implant microchips in your kids’ stomachs, that’s total bullshit, are you a moron or what?!’ it isn’t going to get your point across; it’s just going to come across as you being belligerent, patronising and know-it-all, which will get the person pissed off and defensive and less likely to listen to you. It also means the person gets to respond to your tone rather than to the facts you’re posting. It’s fine if your objective is to feel smarter than the other person; less useful if your objective is to get info across.
But if you post, ‘This one’s a myth, thank the gods! It does sound pretty scary, but check out this Snopes link/study/whatever - candy corn’s still safe (or I don’t know what I’d’ve done this Halloween)!’ then the person doesn’t get defensive, and doesn’t have the luxury of skipping the facts and responding only to your tone. So he/she is a lot more likely, in my experience, to actually take in the info.
I have gotten one friend to think before he posts - not alt-med stuff but the stupid end of liberal stuff. “Lets post this Daily Kos piece without even thinking about it.” Yeah, if one of your conservative friends were posting similarly stupid stuff from Fox News you’d think less of their intelligence. Do yourself the favor and think before you post. Do four minutes with Google. You pride yourself on critical thinking skills, maybe you should, you know, use them.
Here is the thing about Facebook people - only the friends who agree with you are going to see it and be swayed - well, they won’t be swayed, they agree with you. The rest of us you are coming off as a nutbar without critical thinking skills if you post 42 gun rights memes, anti-vax rants, psuedo-science woo, Obama is a Nazi or Corporations are EVVILLLL rants every day.
I’ve got a friend who’s really a great guy- generous, loyal, happy, eager, honest, etc… College educated and extremely smart as well.
But he posts the most absurd and ignorant stuff about medicine- things about acidifying your blood to fight cancer, how vaccines cause disease and the like. It perplexes me to no end how he believes this stuff, and he’s not quite close enough to me for me to just say “You’re being stupid- here’s why”, and I haven’t come up with a diplomatic way to say that without potentially pissing him off.
All the nonsense I’ve seen about changing your pH to improve health, cure cancer etc. revolves around the idea that your blood is too acid, and that alkalizing it is essential.
Of course, none of these people can be convinced that one’s pH is very tightly controlled by natural homeostatic mechanisms (largely involving the lungs and kidneys), and that it is impossible to change your pH through diet or supplements (a good thing, since if you were able to “alkalize” your blood, you’d be dead in short order).
That is good advice, I’ll give it a try. Of course, when the myth is so-called “good news” like “Did you know? Ten garden vegetables that actually cure cervical cancer when shoved up your hoo-ha”, this doesn’t work so well…
Those lucky people, most of them much less jaded and cynical than I am, get linked to Snopes. Every time. I have family whose posts we take turns Snopesing because nobody can stand to do it 10 times a day. You gotta keep Aunt Bea on the friends list though, in case she decides to post something useful.
The rest, like cousin Moonshine McArsenal, get removed from the news feed.
“Yes, it turns out that we were wrong about the watermelons and pumpkins. The cucumbers and butternut squash, on the other hand, is still perfectly adequate.”
Yep. Also works with the “missing children” posts who were missing and then found three years ago. “Great news! They found her a week later!” with a link, and I call it a day. I’ve noticed a lot fewer of this sort of post lately, and I credit it to that style of response (but they’re cyclical, so perhaps it’s just a matter of time.)
That’s when you “wish” it would work. And, I mean, in a broad sense, you do, right? It *would *be wonderful if a dill-do would cure cancer with no side effects, it really would. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if this really worked? Sadly, it doesn’t. [LINK]”
Oh, I dunno - the “isn’t it great this isn’t true” angle works here too:
“What’s worse than having cervical cancer? Having cervical cancer AND a pineapple up your hoo-hah. Thankfully, that sad truth no longer is the case, as we have discovered that pineapple-impregnated-hoo-hahs do not in fact aid in healing cervical cancer. Hoo-hahs of the world, rejoice.”
As I posted in another pit thread, I have two of my mere 44 FB friends who post stupid, snopes worthy right wing crap. I’ve simply removed their posts from my feed. If they were more of a bother, I would defriend them and tell them why. One actually is that much of a bother, but I’m really friends with her husband and, knowing that she goes in to his FB account, I don’t want to have her removing me from HIS friend’s list.
[LINK]”