Leave the palm cards, judge wig and gavel at home.
As soon as someone yells something as hare-brained as “Satan caused the Astroworld tragedy”, your first instinct might be to call the person an idiot. However, consider holding back on the urge to myth-bust or fact-check because basically…it doesn’t work.
Through analysing the 2012 and 2016 US elections, researchers found that once an initial fact or thought was established in someone’s brain, attempts to destabilise that fact with contrasting information not only failed, but it actually made the person’s belief in the misinformation stronger and led them to attack the person delivering the new information.
Therefore, no matter how many times you scream “vaccines are safe!”, all the other person will hear is “you’re right. Vaccines DO cause autism!”.
What makes fact-checking worse is that for those who dive down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, a major tenet of their belief is that mainstream media’s ‘facts’ are thinly veiled government propaganda or just absolute rubbish. So essentially, if you fact-check them, you’re doing exactly what the underlords said you would do – acting as a brainwashed mouthpiece for the government.
Instead of attempting to prove what’s right and what’s wrong, try to understand how the person arrived at their conclusion. Ask questions about where they got their information from, who shared it and why they trust their source. If you feel comfortable, share the sources you trust and the thought process that led you to your own conclusion. Your role in this conversation is not to prove the person wrong, but to encourage them to critically think about the sources they trust.