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The way I used to research conspiracy theories vs how I do it now is night and day
Back in 2015 I'd just read one random blog post and take it as gospel, like the whole Denver Airport thing. Now I cross-check everything across at least three sources and look for actual dates and names. What changed for me was catching a major YouTuber I trusted completely faking a document about the JFK files. Has anyone else totally revamped how they dig into this stuff after getting burned?
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the_beth4d ago
One specific example I always think about is the whole "Flat Earth" resurgence from around 2016. It's worth asking if the real lesson here is that we all just got a little too serious about things that were never meant to be serious to begin with. Maybe the bigger change isn't in our research methods, but in remembering that most of this stuff is just entertainment dressed up as information.
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Three years ago my buddy Mark was dead set on proving that 5G towers were causing birds to fall out of the sky. He showed me this shaky cell phone video of some pigeons acting weird near a tower in Ohio and I almost bought into it. Then he tried to link it to that huge flock of red-winged blackbirds that died in 2011 and I asked him to actually pull up the dates. Turned out the pigeon video was from 2017 and the blackbird thing happened in Arkansas not Ohio, and the tower near his house wasn't even built until 2021. @the_beth kind of nailed it though because Mark ended up just being really into the drama of it all and dropped the whole thing once he couldn't find a clean timeline.
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