A Broadband Engineer Was Spat on by a 5G Conspiracy Theorist. Now He Has Coronavirus.
@kravietz This is fuel for my father to send me more conspiracy theory. Latest one was that 5G is not enough to do you harm, but mandatory vaccination due to covid19 in combination with 5G is.
You should make the sacrifice yourself and dive in search for the most fringe theories out there and just start sending them in response. This helped awake my relatives in a very similar case. The trick employed by Facebook is to feed them stories that are fringe but not fringe enough to risk raising skepticism - if you break this threshold and show him where this actually comes from, this usually has a very good therapeutic effect.
@kravietz Its just sad overall, my father gets all this conspiracy content from Viber messenger, and he gets them from people deeply involved in religion (my father is very religious too). What concerns me is that we have young people on YouTube who also promote these conspiracy theories and I think they do that because they are using the situation.
There's no silver bullet here - you need to have a lot of facts at hand and be ready to explain them for hours. And ridicule the original stories by showing inconsistencies and contradictions.
To be honest, now I perceive those people more like someone desperately asking to disprove the bullshit they're fed with rather than intentional spreaders.
@kravietz I'm more worried on how people will perceive my father in future, he is really loud about it and I don't want him to be perceived as fool. Another bad thing going on with him is that he sees his own family as people who work against him. Will try to figure out something to change this, thanks for advices anyway
From personal experience, it's likely that in 1-2 years he will actually see through and become just as active in combating the fakes. There's no stronger motivation than believing someone and then finding out they were selling you fakes all the time.
@kravietz I certainly hope so