Some stuff is plausible but wrong, like taking certain antiviral drugs to combat Covid. Others completely defy everything we know about physics, like 5G spreading Covid. And some stuff is true, like staying at home breaking the chain of transmission. But people believe all of the above and none of the above appear different or are treated differently on social media sites.
Some of the opinions and statements that influential people say are dangerous and either harm directly or cause others to harm and a lot of them build on existing divisions further breaking apart our communities.
A few days ago we had an earthquake in my home city, our liberal prime minister was having a live interview when it happened. On news sites when they played the interview the comments were full of people saying it was Trump blowing up tunnels which were being used to traffic children as sex slaves by the liberal government.
That's obviously insane, not least because I live on a group of islands 3,000 kilometres away from the next country and that's one hell of a tunnel, but also because that's not a thing that governments do in transparent and well run democracies.
Unfortunately there's a subset of the population who are unstable and prone to believe anything, and the fact that it's discredited probably drives them to believe it more. But there's a much larger subset who are susceptible to arguments but not critical of them and may be more inclined to see reason if given information backing that up.
So, the question is how do you debunk blatant falsehoods while still balancing peoples freedom to believe what they want.