Conspiracy Theories Spread Worldwide. What Can Be Done?

With the advent of social media, conspiracy theories spread like wild-fire. I’m generally not one to believe sinister and preposterous conspiracy theories such as: 

1. The moon-landing that never happened.

2. A cabal of satanic, cannibalistic, child-abusers who dominate politics in the US, according to Q-Anon.

3. The Illuminati control the world.

4. Vaccines will kill us. Nearly all covid deaths are now among unvaccinated (AP). How do we persuade the unvaccinated? (click).

5. 9/11 was an inside job by the US government or Israel.

6. The 2020 election was stolen.

7. There’s an extreme threat of a New World Order controlled by one-world government.

8. Super-rich, sinister and powerful people, such as Bill Gates, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds,  George Soros control much of the world. These theories are tinged with racism and bigotry like economic anti-semitism, nativism, or isolationism.  

Wikipedia has compiled a fairly comprehensive list of dozens of conspiracy theories. Click.

A few conspiracy theories are based on actual evidence and contain grains of truth, as this Readers Digest article pointed out.

In my experience and observation, the world is a lot more complex and chaotic, and humans are far more likely to reveal secrets than dark conspiracy theories allow. I tend to believe Occam’s Razor, that the simplest explanation is the likeliest.

Does that mean I dismiss all conspiracy theories? No. It’s quite possible John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated by conspiracies, not just one lone