Does pushing back against disinformation actually amplify disinformation?
It’s a question that journalists and debunkers constantly grapple with – whether their efforts to expose the truth about conspiracy theories merely expose more people to conspiracy theories. And by extension, they give life to a conspiracy theory just at the point where it should be hitting the limit of people open to believing it. Even just the act of taking apart misinformation can be used as proof that the misinformation is the truth, and that the person taking it apart is a paid shill trying to “contain the damage.”
There’s a name for this phenomenon, the “backfire effect.” Coined in 2010 to describe proponents of the Iraq War digging in deeper when evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction was debunked, the backfire effect essentially states that, as RationalWiki puts it, “in the face of contradictory evidence, established beliefs do not change but actually get stronger.”
Mike Rothschild 