We are not Alone
14th March 2022
It’s nice to be reminded sometimes that the number of skeptics in society is likely to exceed the number of Skeptics in our Society by several orders of magnitude. I was reminded of this recently after seeing a couple of interactions on social media, one where a friend tackled misinformation, and another where it was the friend that was spreading misinformation. In both interactions, the misinformation was quickly and easily debunked, with references given to sources. The first one was about Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy being a Nazi, as “proven” by a picture of him holding up a football (I’m from England, so for all you kiwis I mean soccer here) shirt with his name and a swastika on it. The second is about the recent parliament protest, with an image of a child who had supposedly been pepper sprayed by the Police.
In both cases, these stories were debunked by people who were able to link to the original sources. In the first case, it was an undoctored version of the Zelenskyy picture, where the image on the shirt was the number 95 rather than a swastika. In the second case, the image actually came from one of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the US a couple of years ago.
It was heartening to see everyday kiwis calmly tackling misinformation online by searching for the origin of the source material and calmly posting their refutations. I suspect that many of us skeptics, and many of those kiwis who are skeptical but don’t consider themselves “Skeptics”, are doing this online every day - although I accept that this kind of activism isn’t for everyone. Sometimes it’s much easier, and less combative, to talk past those who are posting dodgy news articles, and try to reach out to those who are sitting on the fence and are more likely to be swayed by good evidence. Although I’m really bad at doing this, I see many friends online posting good, skeptical articles to their social media accounts and engaging with their friends in the comments in positive ways.
This week we have a follow-up piece from Jonathon Harper about Sandra Goudie, a piece from regular contributor and podcast co-host Bronwyn Rideout about methylene blue, and I tackle a conspiracy theory involving our PM and look into a local potential scam that has been big news on the interwebs - an interesting tale of NFTs (which I’ve already talked about on our new Podcast, so you may already know a little about it). Don’t worry if you’re one of the many people who doesn’t understand what an NFT is, I’ve attempted to write a short primer for you. If your response after reading it is “but that makes no sense”, trust me, that’s a perfectly normal reaction - NFTs make no sense to me either.
Finally, I’ve added a Table of Contents to our newsletter to help people who might only want to read one or two of our stories - hopefully it’ll work okay, and hopefully it’ll be of use to some of you!
