When I was a child, my parents were in a cult - a branch of the Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian offshoot that among other things vehemently argued that the Sabbath was SATURDAY and not SUNDAY and held worship service on that day accordingly. (The people who argue about too many pronouns clearly have never tried to keep track of all the different branches of Christianity. Now THAT'S needlessly complicated) We'd never been very well off so we kept nearly everything we ever bought that could be reused, with piles of boxes stacked inside each other in every room of the house and roaches everywhere. (To this day, I can't drink from an open glass if I've looked away from it at all; too many times I went to take a drink from a glass and found an insect floating in my off-brand Kool-Aid. Only from bottles or cups with lids.) When 9-11 happened (and the Anthrax mail poisonings especially) everything sort of snapped; we were taken out of school to be taught at home by my mom when she got home from her cashier job, we had to triple-wash any food we brought home from the grocery store (yes, we Lysol-sprayed literally everything), every possible step was taken to keep us 'safe' from the 'government toxins' around everything. It wasn't germ-phobia, it was just xenophobia to its most literal and extreme.
The only problem is none of that actually happened. I made that all up. But it felt really good to know who to hate for a moment, didn't it? You felt like you'd learned something - to avoid Seventh Day Adventists because they're messy hoarders who hate the outside world - anger can be addicting, and knowing how to keep yourself safe from a danger you didn't know existed until just now was satisfying.
See, it's easy to believe that propaganda is just advertising or mainstream media; that it's perpetuated by Them, by faceless massive industries of evil. And yes, that's absolutely part of it - if advertising didn't work, it wouldn't be an industry of almost $500 billion dollars. But anecdotal stories like the one I just shared could also be considered propaganda. You hear about something specific that (presumably) happened to an individual and it feels so much more real than any sort of scientific group-study. This is anecdotal bias and it's also why TikTok is so good at spreading misinformation. Everything that's said feels so much more real and personable.
Humans are a very social species, and we remember personal stories that get an emotional reaction more than we remember boring, impersonal scientific papers. If someone says that they get headaches from the MSG in Chinese food when you have a migraine after eating Panda Express, you're going to remember that situation much better than you might remember the chemical similarities between sodium chloride (table salt) and monosodium glutamate (MSG) OR remember other factors (atmospheric pressure, caffeine withdrawal, dehydration) that could cause your condition. Chemistry and barometric pressure are abstract, you aren't measuring how much water you drink in a day, but Tina the barista is real and tangible and always remembers to put one and a half pumps of syrup in your latte so that's the 'evidence' that sticks.
So! You don't need to argue with strangers who are sharing their personal stories (not everything is a Down With Cis Bus or an HIV-Living blog. Parts of the story I made up in the first paragraph actually happened to different people I know.) but it IS a good habit to be careful what anecdotes you're echoing and sharing as facts. Pay attention to when someone is assigning labels like "____phobe" or "pedophile" or "predator" to an individual or a group you don't know anything about. The way that some 'progressive' people on here talk about furries sounds exactly like how my mom's side of the family talks about Muslims. Elon Musk's inflated sense of self is very likely a side effect of the ketamine he has openly said he takes (delusional thinking is a known side effect of that drug) not just because he's autistic or absurdly rich; and saying that he's extra nefarious because he's not born in the US is, unfortunately, text-book xenophobia even when it's coming from people who are pro-immigration and anti-racist.
Good intentions can still leaded to flawed thinking. Slow down. Pay attention to what you're sharing.
