So, every so often I get people who come to my twitter after I debunked something and tell me all about how the effort was noble but the denialists won't listen so I basically wasted my time and I should have done something else with it. I want to talk about this a bit.

As much as I appreciate your unsolicited, cynical insight that was so obviously beyond my ken, these denialists aren't my target audience and I do not waste a second caring about whether their minds will be changed by the content I put out.

Misinformation does not exist in a vacuum. It should be treated like a contagion.

There will be some people who are naturally immune e.g. the content experts pertaining to that misinformation.

There will be some people who are infected i.e. they believe in this misinformation.

That leaves the susceptibles.

You know, your regular, run-of-the-mill civilians who aren't content experts but are bombarded by memes, who don't have time to do the fact-checking, or for whom the misinformation has appeal because of heuristics. Those are the ones I care about.

Putting the debunk out there makes it possible to immunize them against that particular quantum of misinformation.

It also means that they are now armed with a resource that can be used to further immunize other susceptibles, or can do it themselves if they're ambitious.

Given enough spread of the debunk, a critical enough portion of the population becomes immune that the misinformation quanta cannot propagate through the population effectively and has minimal propensity to disrupt society.

Some light reads on the subject matter:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3166095
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0380-8
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07034-4
https://www.nature.com/news/take-the-time-and-effort-to-correct-misinformation-1.21106
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5738254/pdf/189e1567.pdf
https://www.nature.com/articles/540525a
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00620-w.pdf
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/uoea-fnm021320.php
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2820%2930721-0
https://www.jmir.org/2020/6/e21820/pdf

Also deplatforming and countering disinformation are not mutually exclusive. Removing persistent reservoirs of misinformation can be an important impediment to its spread! But it doesn't help with the misinformation already out there.

Thanks @aetiology https://twitter.com/aetiology/status/1332140366561226752?s=20

Also just as a heads up- I’m not used to getting anything close to the number of notifications this thread is giving me so I’m going to mute notifications on it but if you need me you can tag me or DM