> In my own experience, I have seen this sort of argument used to wrongly shutdown debates about reasonable topics.

We used to have an effective way to deal with that, which did a great job of keeping most of the actually very bad stuff from spreading but still provided a way for the non-bad stuff that was misclassified to overcome that misclassification.

It was pretty simple. It was expensive to quickly reach a mass audience if you message was too far from the mainstream and did not come from a source that was already established as being reasonable.

So if you were claiming, for instance, that a large wildfire was caused by poor maintenance of old electrical infrastructure running through large dry areas full of combustible material and you were a known expert on wildfires, your explanation would be picked up by the national news broadcast networks and most of the press.

If you were claiming the fire was caused by Jewish space lasers, the national media would ignore you. If you wanted to reach a mass audience quickly you'd have to buy ads, or print a pamphlet and mass mail it. If you did that, that itself might be newsworthy enough for the national media to notice and run stories debunking you, which would reach plenty of people your campaign had not yet reached and make it harder for you to convince them. If you wanted to avoid that by getting your message out faster, it cost a lot of money, and most originators of the crazy stuff didn't have that kind of money.

But what about the case where it isn't something like Jewish space lasers, but rather something that is actually true that the mainstream is quite wrong about? That's going to end up suppressed just like the Jewish space lasers, right?

At first, yes. But if it is actually true, you will still be able to slowly spread it. You might have to resort to spreading it a person at a time for quite a while, where you can sit down with them and go over all the evidence for your claim, and answer any objections. It might take a long time, as you slowly convince people one at a time, and some of those start doing the same thing, but eventually you will convince people who have sufficient mainstream trust that they can get the mainstream to take you seriously.

We didn't end up getting all the truth right away under this approach, but the "crazy sounding but true" stuff would eventually get separated from the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff.

That the former took longer to spread in order to keep the latter from spreading was fine, because the fact is that the mainstream was right most of the time, and most of the things it was wrong about are things where it was not urgent to correct them right away.

This got all blown to bits when we got social media and a lot of people started using social media as their main (or only) source of information. Now people see all the different crazy things out there, both the "crazy sounding but true" stuff and the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff. It is quite possible that someone will see more of the crazy stuff than they see mainstream stuff.

And once they start reacting to the crazy stuff, the algorithms that construct their feeds see that, and increase the amount of crazy stuff.

This has greatly leveled the playing field between true and false and between crazy and sane. Toss in the fact that it is a lot easier to create crazy false things than it is to debunk them, and the average person doesn't a stand a chance.