Facts will not win the conspiracy war

The idea that we can fight conspiracy theorists with facts is an illusion. We view the audience of conspiracy influencers like Alex Jones as naïve and in need of education: if only they could see the facts, they would see their errors. But the conspiracy world, far from abandoning facts and reason, has stylistically claimed them as its own. Questioning the facts is not enough. We need a whole new mythology around truth and its pursuit. Writes Sun-ha Hong. After every storm comes a legal vacuum. The panic around fake news and the end of facts has gone from an omnipresent din to a familiar, if uncomfortable, elephant crouching in the room, reminding us every now and then: How exactly does misinformation/disinformation work? What makes so many of us so susceptible to it? Is all the fact-checking helpful? Although there are many different forms of information pollution – the contamination of…

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