I don’t know, my wife spends literal hours a day arguing with people on Facebook about COVID-19, citing CDC statistics, sometimes arguing with 20 people at a time.
The problem is the flow of all this goes something like.
1) A friend of hers posts something factually incorrect about COVID or lockdowns.
2) My wife posts a carefully worded and cited response.
3) Four or five people react with laugh or angry emojis.
4) someone weighs in and tells my wife how stupid and dumb she is, and how she is completely wrong. They often say this in a very nasty way.
5) She responds in a firm but not rude way that she believes they are wrong. She cites sources.
6) This person never responds again, and drops off.
7) A new person weighs in, generally rudely, making ad hominem attacks about her weight or whatever else they can.
8) She argues with them as well, never personally attacking them. She focuses on facts and statistics.
9) Over the course of hours she starts to accumulate likes and a significant number of people thumbs up her responses despite not saying anything.
I don’t know how she manages it, honestly. I can’t argue like this at all, it’s completely draining. She likes to think that because the threads are so active that hundreds of people are watching and she’s helping to change minds to think more rationally. But it’s hard to know for sure, and I don’t think most people have the psychological wherewithal that she has to deal with how abrasive and rude all these people are to her.
> 2) My wife posts a carefully worded and cited response.
> 3) Four or five people react with laugh or angry emojis.
> 4) someone weighs in and tells my wife how stupid and dumb she is, and how she is completely wrong. They often say this in a very nasty way.
> 5) She responds in a firm but not rude way that she believes they are wrong. She cites sources.
> 6) This person never responds again, and drops off.
Happens to me as well in other forums.
I have decided I'm not doing it for those people, but rather for those who would otherwise read the post, see it was uncontested and think "therefore it must be true".
Kudos to her for trying. I’m sure it feels like picking up a single bag of litter while mass pollution continues all around us, but change starts small and if only more people put in the effort to contest nonsense when they see it, we’d be further ahead than any technological solution to misinformation.
The problem is the flow of all this goes something like.
1) A friend of hers posts something factually incorrect about COVID or lockdowns.
2) My wife posts a carefully worded and cited response.
3) Four or five people react with laugh or angry emojis.
4) someone weighs in and tells my wife how stupid and dumb she is, and how she is completely wrong. They often say this in a very nasty way.
5) She responds in a firm but not rude way that she believes they are wrong. She cites sources.
6) This person never responds again, and drops off.
7) A new person weighs in, generally rudely, making ad hominem attacks about her weight or whatever else they can.
8) She argues with them as well, never personally attacking them. She focuses on facts and statistics.
9) Over the course of hours she starts to accumulate likes and a significant number of people thumbs up her responses despite not saying anything.
I don’t know how she manages it, honestly. I can’t argue like this at all, it’s completely draining. She likes to think that because the threads are so active that hundreds of people are watching and she’s helping to change minds to think more rationally. But it’s hard to know for sure, and I don’t think most people have the psychological wherewithal that she has to deal with how abrasive and rude all these people are to her.