As we’ve covered on Bored Panda recently, some people like to believe in conspiracy theories because it gives them a sense of control in a chaotic and confusing world. The scarier and more uncertain a situation is, the more likely that people will cling to theories that, though inaccurate, help them make sense of the world.
Conspiracy theories aren’t backed by evidence. The people who believe in them discount any evidence that doesn’t support them. However, if you’re willing to consider evidence and are open to changing your mind when given solid proof, you’re less likely to fall victim to a conspiracy theory.
The world doesn’t objectively become a less complicated place because someone chooses to believe simplistic black-or-white narratives. It’s up to us to look for the nuances and embrace them, even if they’re uncomfortable or don’t match our subjective experiences or political leanings.
A good rule of thumb is to be extremely wary of claims that are overly simplistic or have very clear heroes and villains. The world is more complicated than clean and clear fights between perfect good and total evil. That’s why context, provided by reliable sources, matters so much.
Over 693.6K people follow @cnviolations, aka ‘community notes violating people,’which documents some of the most epic takedowns of misinformation, as done by members of the @communitynotes project—a real program meant to combat lies on X.
The @cnviolations account on X is in no way affiliated with the social network, nor the @communitynotes program. However, indirectly, it shares a lot of comedic moments and also shows to what extent some social media users twist the truth or believe in others’ lies.
The actual Community Notes project has 782.8K followers and describes itself as a collaborative way to add helpful context to posts. This way, everyone using X or reading tweets (or are those called Xs now?) elsewhere, can stay better informed.
Though it’s no panacea, the project does reduce the number of people who are misled. All with the power of helpful notes!
The people who contribute to the Community Notes mission are regular users of the X social network. They sign up to write and rate notes. As the founders of the project point out, “the more people that participate, the better the program becomes.” It’s not like random notes show up on posts all over X, however.
Only notes that are rated helpful by people “from diverse perspectives” appear on posts.
“To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings,” the Community Notes team explains in detail.
They believe that it’s vital to give X users a voice in providing informative, diverse context to posts on the network.
