I think conspiracy theories are certainly a valid point, although I think traditionally it was only a very small subset of the population that would ascribe to them.

Having said that social media I think play an important role in making it easy to lock yourself into a bubble with like-minded people, but as I said I want to talk about that a bit more extensively later.

But, I still think that a wealth of evidence that people can verify themselves, that doesn’t come from the group that’s involved in the conspiracy, can still help. Yes, there’s going to be the true crazies that can’t be convinced and think even facebook, twitter and all the satellite companies are ‘in league’ with their particular enemy, but I’d like to think that’s a true minority.

Suppose I believe that those very many sources aren’t really independent. Suppose I believe they’re all “the liberal elite” or “the conservative media” – a single homogeneous entity with one agenda.

Now, I’ve got many distinct sources that happen to agree with me, and one source disagreeing. The evidence is overwhelming: the one source (“the conservative media” or “the liberal elite”) is obviously wrong, and I’m not sure how you would convince me otherwise.

(Side note: this is why representation and identity are important. If a whole demographic of “other” people appear to be a homogeneous group, you’ll weight all of their opinions as if they were a single viewpoint.)