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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Effort would (IMO) be better spent on showing them how to figure out whether a secondary source is trustworthy than having them try to dissect scientific papers or other primary research materials with an extremely limited understanding of how to do so.
Most laypeople do not have the skills or desire to become good interpreters of scientific, law, technical, or other jargon-laden documents. Some people do not have the mental capacity required to even read raw Clinton staffer email leaks without coming up with shit like Pizzagate.
It doesn't help that WikiLeaks added editorial titles to the emails that bore little to no connection to what was actually written. People literally just read the titles, saw that an email was there, and believed it.
I think it was also indexed, so people started doing things similar to what they're talking about in the article which is basically...they'd use the search engine with some bad search criteria and pretend it proved whatever point it was they were trying to make, even if in context it was completely orthogonal to what they were talking about but just matched via keyword.
I encountered a few of those in the wild at the time...either on Reddit or Twitter (or perhaps both?). They'd send you a query string link and pretend that it was proof someone was a demon or something.