Ask HN: How to deal with loved ones that are affected by fake news?

Don't guide them with facts. Guide them to seek the truth. There's a reason they're avoiding truth. Fix that.

In my case, what works is asking them to seek God for advice. If they die from someone's bad advice, then the angels will ask them why they chose to follow that advice when their hearts told them otherwise. If they follow God's advice and died, then it's just their time and they'd be judged as martyrs for following it.

Everyone I've said that to later took the vaccine. It doesn't have to be religious, but appeal to their highest morality, not yours.

I'm on a similar situation myself too; in my case my loved ones are well educated (physicists and biologists), and aged (over 60s & 70s).

You need to change your perspective and realise that for them, you are the person that believes on "fake news". During my talks with them, I've tried lots of different approaches to demystify some of their arguments; I made my own plots based on open data for COVID-19, I used well-sourced articles from newspapers or even published white papers, until I realised that the matter is based on opinionated believes rather than a lack of fact-checked information.

Now, I'm treating these conversations similarly to having a political discussion; there are some parts that we both disagree and this is fine, but we also have some grey areas that we can discuss further about. The fact that I'm also "challenging" myself with alternative questions and perspectives, I think it makes me better to do a better data-search for the next time.

Having said that, what I do respect the most on them is the fact that they try to seek their own personal opinion. But "popularised science" in ongoing matters is hard to find, thus the only easy-to-digest content is through groups and videos that carry-on with promoting misinformation; news that are not fact-check but only based on opinions (usually political driven).

So as you mentioned, the main problem is the lack of fact-checking popularised sources & channels. One example that does exist is "TL;DR; News" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugJkIEfv8vI

Actual facts would be something like washing your hands or boiling water preventing diseases. Nobody questions it anymore but they once did. But for the same reason, it's important to let people question. It was once doctors who opposed the idea of sanitation.