Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
They can, it just doesn't work terribly well. Persuading people is not necessarily about actual facts or rationality, even at the best of times, without even involving any strong feelings, or identifying with outcomes, or other interests of conflict.
Facing profit motives, politics, power dynamics, organized propaganda, and bad faith argumentation in general, it's even more grim. Russia and the other troll farmers are making a concerted specific effort out of this. The numbers, resources, and, sadly, human psychology, are on their side.
Making up some bullshit about 5G mRNA causing steel beams takes 10 seconds, maybe add another 5 for calling you a sheep once you rightly ask what the fuck whoever's been smoking. If you wanted to debunk the actual claim, you'd spend orders of magnitude more time and effort than they did, only for them to refuse to even glance at your arguments and studies. Assuming the entire belief isn't fake just to fuck with people, "facts and logic" certainly weren't involved in arriving at it, and are unlikely to budge the actual reason for that belief.