kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@nikolal

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.

@nikolal

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.

@nikolal

I had the same with some of my relatives who are not only religious (or they claim so) but also nationalist.

Each visit to Poland end in a night long angry debates where they explain me things about other countries they've never been to but which I'm visiting all the time 😂 So I know how frustrating this can be.

@nikolal

Another trick they employ is to localize the stories - so in Russia the villain will be American, Jew or Polish, but in Poland the same story will have a Russian, Jew or German as the villain.

So if you show people a story that is exactly the same in the main body of the conspiracy but - surprise! - the villain is one of "ours", this creates a cognitive dissonance and again helps work out skepticism.

@nikolal

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.

@OpenCulture

Be prepared to see "cryptic" quite frequently in the first chapters 😂