Fact-Checking Their Crazy Won’t Make Your Story Sound Sane

I love this riff from journalist Gabriel Gatehouse on why more fact-checking doesn’t work to combat conspiracy theories.

Fact-checking doesn’t work because you have to build a better story.

Telling someone a crazy idea is wrong doesn’t displace the crazy idea. Giving them a better story that takes over the formerly crazy real estate in their brain can work.

Uprooting a story is never easy, but the concept is easy to forget.

Instead of checking someone’s facts line by line to refute them, look for a better story to replace all of that tangled logic with.

h/t Gabriel Gatehouse’s interview on The Problem with John Stewart podcast