How to talk to conspiracy theorists about Atlantis · Gabe Stein

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It’s tempting to think of conspiracy theorists as uneducated, unintelligent, insane, or bad-faith actors. But we’re increasingly finding that the inverse is often true.

In a fascinating and somewhat controversial newish preprint , a group of MIT and Wellesley researchers dive deep into COVID anti-mask belief, relaying insights both from a quantitative study of thousands of images and from qualitative “infiltration” of anti-mask Facebook groups. Their core finding is one that everyone working in news, misinformation, and related fields ought to internalize: Far from ignoring scientific evidence to argue for individual freedom, antimaskers often engage deeply with public datasets and make what we call “counter-visualizations”—visualizations using orthodox metho

How to talk to conspiracy theorists about Atlantis · Gabe Stein

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