> I always find it interesting to watch the trickle down of news I find here on HN. I live in a very, very, very conservative part of the US. It always goes the same; see fake thing called out for being fake on HN. One week later, hear rumblings related to the fake thing in my community. One week after that, hear people openly talking about how that fake thing is true, but Google/MSM don't want you to hear about it.
The the root cause for that is probably the extreme distrust of the "MSM" that's been cultivated for decades. The ironic thing is many of the rank-and-file of those people think that distrust gives them greater access to the truth, when in reality it just makes them easier to lie to.
> The ironic thing is many of the rank-and-file of those people think that distrust gives them greater access to the truth, when in reality it just makes them easier to lie to.
I've had some heated discussions with my father over this. He has a disdain for anything reported by main-stream media, that is at least partially warranted. But he overcorrects to this by accepting the reporting by fringe media outlets / decentralized media figures (podcasters, youtubers, etc) without the same critical lens that he would otherwise apply. If someone says something to the tune of: "the MSM won't report on this because <insert reasoning here>, but we will!", he almost always accepts what they say next. It's very frustrating for me since he will say this line as an automatic "I win this argument" trump card on any idea regardless of the independent merits.
This shouldn't be a bold statement, but I feel like some people need this shouted at them: Just because something is reported on by a main stream media outlet doesn't mean it's automatically true. And conversely just because something is reported on by a main stream media outlet doesn't mean it's automatically false either. Alternative media is perfectly capable of presenting misleading, or false information!
> The ironic thing is many of the rank-and-file of those people think that distrust gives them greater access to the truth, when in reality it just makes them easier to lie to.
Care to elaborate? Intuitively what you're saying sounds plausible, but not why that would be the case.
What the last few years has really brought into sharp focus is that many people who distrust "official sources" (mainstream media, scientists, etc) seem to unquestioningly accept fringe sources, so long as it matches their prior beliefs.
Many of these same people consider themselves "skeptics" because they instinctively distrust the official sources.
(i) "this is the sort if story that, if true, would be widely reported by mainstream media or at least mainstream media of a certain political persuasion" is a pretty good heuristic for discarding stuff that sounds plausible and really big but is only reported on the comment section of AltFreeIndyInfo.net
(ii) if you can't believe mainstream media, it's hard to search for information that might contradict $radicaltheory, never mind trust someone else's thoroughly researched and sourced one. So even if it's a pretty wild theory that lots of other stuff seems to contradict and very little seems to corroborate, how can we be sure it isn't a coverup. Scepticism about well established facts leads to agnosticism about the veracity of well-established fiction.
(iii)"if you tell people this and they laugh at you and say it's ridiculous it's because they're the credulous idiots who believe anything they read in certain sources" is a very powerful meme.
(iv) people who don't believe in certain sources still tend to want to get stuff they can believe in from somewhere, and the average website that concurs that MSM is not to be trusted and embraces the meme that its reader base are the true freethinking sceptics publishes considerably more fake news and terrible takes than the mainstream media
They are primed to ignore any contrary evidence, that would disprove lies they are being told, that they see on MSM or in fact anywhere. Once they believe a specific channel of information or community is the only one they can trues, they can be sold on anything.
The the root cause for that is probably the extreme distrust of the "MSM" that's been cultivated for decades. The ironic thing is many of the rank-and-file of those people think that distrust gives them greater access to the truth, when in reality it just makes them easier to lie to.