I’m not sure how to get to a place where we see fewer bold false claims, but a culture of giving sources, and supporting requests for them, seems like it would help?
A culture of giving sources and supporting requests for them is a culture of “doing your own research”. Over the last years, the ideology of the censorship industrial complex is that “doing your own research” is bad and that people should instead believe in the authorities. No mainstream media outlet would run an OPed titled “In defense of doing your own research”.
Culturally, many people believe that it’s important to trust in authorities instead of make statements in support of the mainstream narrative.
This leads to strange effects such as posts on skeptics.stackexchange that ask whether certain antivaxx claims are true getting downvoted in a way that they wouldn’t have five years ago because investigating whether nonmainstream claims are true was part of the point of skeptics.stackexchange.
Actually, advocating for a culture of “doing your own research” is not going to be an easy project.
A culture of giving sources and supporting requests for them is a culture of “doing your own research”. Over the last years, the ideology of the censorship industrial complex is that “doing your own research” is bad and that people should instead believe in the authorities. No mainstream media outlet would run an OPed titled “In defense of doing your own research”.
Culturally, many people believe that it’s important to trust in authorities instead of make statements in support of the mainstream narrative.
This leads to strange effects such as posts on skeptics.stackexchange that ask whether certain antivaxx claims are true getting downvoted in a way that they wouldn’t have five years ago because investigating whether nonmainstream claims are true was part of the point of skeptics.stackexchange.
Actually, advocating for a culture of “doing your own research” is not going to be an easy project.