>Most people are just repeating something they've heard, and couldn't analyze the merits of a claim if they wanted to.
This is something I have thought about a bit over last several years. A lot of people I trust to have good intentions seem to regularly indulge in untruths or exaggerations to rile up support for their cause.
One particular example that comes to mind is how pretty much all liberal voices (including nobel peace prize winner Kalyan Sathyarthi) spread lies about a child labour bill in India that was passed in 2016. All of them were saying in unison that this bill was weakening the existing child labour laws and will allow all sort of child exploitation. So, I decided to read the bill and the original act that the bill was supposed to amend. I was stunned. There was absolutely no truth to the claims. The bill was actually making the child labour law much, much more stringend and I, even with my programmer in bug-fixing mode brain, couldn't conjure up a single hypothetical scenario where a child was forbidden from working earlier would now be allowed to work. So why were all these people lying? Why would Kalyan Sathyarthi, of all people, who has saved hundreds of thousands of children from child labour and trafficking, lie about something that pertains directly to his life's work?
The only explanation I could think of is that perhaps the law didn't go as far enough or didn't include certain amendments as they wanted and this was their way of pressurizing the government to listen to them. But that still left a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps this is something my brain, trained to value truth above everything else, isn't quite mature enough to understand.