When we enter the political debate sphere of the online world, I think we consider people holding these beliefs to be unreal. The information age means almost anybody can become informed about any topic, right? Someone who believes in these conspiracies has got to be a troll or using their anonymity to espouse harmful beliefs they’d never talk about in-person. They’re an edgy teenager, a kid who hasn’t learned to navigate the harmful trappings of the internet; they’re an old codger, still holding onto the good old days where they had all the privilege; they’re just uninformed, and need to study it out.

Approach any of these belief holders and you’ll find they’re fully informed. Plenty of them have just as much time spent online as the most prolific social media celebrities. They’ve spent that time researching the same topics as you and I. Ask for their sources, and you might even be given a wall of links. Studying it out is exactly what they’ve done, and they’re probably more prepared than us. I don’t even have a list of links for any single topic that I can source from for an argument; the majority of my bookmarks are TVTropes pages I moved into a folder after going far enough down that rabbit hole to have 40+ tabs open. My beliefs are pretty strong and founded on research but I guarantee I’ll have to spend a few minutes googling to find something proving my point.

Is the Trump supporter uninformed? Not really. I have a feeling he might have opinions you’d agree with, just like my grandpa. In fact, both shared opinions that I’ll see from all parts of the political spectrum on any given day. Do you think poor people are getting taxed too much? They agree. Do you think property taxes are too high? Ditto. Are there criminals in Washington who get away with murder? I’m sure some of you would toss out the same names as grandpa and the Trump supporter. And I’ve met a fair share of liberals who believe Obama is a war criminal and should be locked up. The Trump supporter at the barbershop might disagree on the details of the why, but shares the common goal of how he should be punished.

What often counts as being informed is the information you’re willing to stand by. The information age’s biggest flaw is how all information is treated as equal in value. Take, for example, the recent Planned Parenthood scandal:

A group known as the Center for Medical Progress published videos which claimed to show Planned Parenthood associates engaging in the sale of body parts from aborted fetuses. The videos were proven to be edited and falsified, with members of CMP impersonating government officials and having created a dummy corporation that pretended to deal in the very same body parts PP was accused of selling.

Texas held a grand jury to potentially indict Planned Parenthood. Instead, the creators of the videos were indicted and Planned Parenthood was found to have committed none of what was levied against them.

Has any of this made a difference? Multiple states are still voting to remove any funding of Planned Parenthood, cutting a lot of people off from their only source of healthcare. Congress is still considering stripping the company of all funding. Any comment section or Twitter thread you visit about Planned Parenthood is likely to have a lot of people calling them baby killers selling baby parts. A shooter in Colorado went on a killing spree at a Planned Parenthood and used those same words when he was arrested.

Just because the information is there, doesn’t mean the person reading it will believe it. And this is, again, nothing particular to any part of the political spectrum. I’m not going to believe anything I read from certain sites and I’m going to dismiss most of what gets said on certain channels. That means that there are times I’ll refuse to believe something that is objectively true. The same is done by you, by grandpa, by the Trump supporter, and everyone else. Only when there’s a consensus from sites I trust will I feel comfortable repeating what’s claimed. Those who believe Planned Parenthood are baby-killing flesh merchants believe any claims to the contrary are part of a conspiracy, because the sites they trust haven’t told them the videos were confirmed to be falsified.