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Listening, questioning, and patience are superpowers.
(How to deal with misinformation)
Right now, there are two major pandemics. The main one is medical, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and you would have had to be living without human contact to have missed it.
The second pandemic is being talked about less. It is an infectious disease that has spread worldwide, affecting substantial numbers of people in most languages. Most of us are infected in some way.
I’m talking about misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.
For the last few years, I have been talking to people who have the worst symptoms, figuring out what helps and what doesn’t. What seldom works is confrontation: the knee-jerk reaction: “you’re wrong” and the unsolicited explanation why. All over the world, keyboard warriors trade ‘truths’ on social media. It's quite the thing.
In fact, if anything, debating often ends up alienating the person you are talking to — because the debate creates a posturing dance, where truths are traded in a fight that seldom produces winners.
On social media, blocking is common-place, though blocking is more likely to create confirmation bias with a growing tendency to only interact with people you agree with.