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shadowrun456 t1_ix8el44 wrote

There's conspiracy theories, and then there's conspiracy theories. What the article argues for is a very noble and utopian idea of "we should fight all disinformation by facts, logic, and reasonable debate" which fails spectacularly in real life, for two reasons:

  1. You can't use logic to debate someone out of a viewpoint which wasn't based on logic in the first place.
  2. A single troll can generate so much disinformation in a day, that it would take an expert literal years to properly debunk it.
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[deleted] t1_ix8h8wl wrote

[deleted]

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shadowrun456 t1_ix8kb1l wrote

>is a strawman argument

You don't know what a straw-man argument is, if you think this was a straw-man argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

A straw-man is purposefully misstating someone else's argument. I wasn't even talking about someone else's argument.

>is defeatist

In theory, yes. In practice, have you ever actually tried debunking stuff that paid trolls post? I did. A troll posted a chart with fake data. It took me 4-5 hours to collect actual data, and draw an actual chart. I went back and posted my reply. I checked the troll's post history. During the 4-5 hours I took to debunk their one post, they have made 57 (yes, I counted) similar posts of disinformation. Assuming I did nothing but debunked posts by this single troll for 12 hours a day, it would have taken me 20 days to debunk what they posted during only 4-5 hours of their time.

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