I wish there was a simple answer to this, but really, it all depends on the person you are talking to. Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing to watch in the wild, it really is. People opposed to Sharia Law on the one hand will demand Christian Law on the other. But your question deserves a well thought out answer so here I will ramble on for a bit and hopefully stumble into at least a partial answer.

Social media, in my opinion, has been a net negative so far. One of the reasons that social media sucks is due to its greatest strengths: Everyone can have a voice, everyone can grow an audience and text is for the most part neutral. When you come across a text-based discussion of something, say the lunar eclipse, it is hard to read into the character and honor of the person you are reading. I mean you could go into the poster's history, compare their words to the words of others, look up a few scientific and engineering articles and come to an informed conclusion but nobody does that. Well, I say nobody; people here on Hubski are not in the majority of people on the internet which is one of the reasons I am here. But the thing about text is that it is inert. Text does not have a facial expressions, or shifty eyes, or shuffling feet. Read something by Alex Jones for instance, and for a moment you can say "Ok I get this guy's point." Then watch him. The guy comes off as bonkers. If I want to know the credibility of someone, I try to find a video of them talking, preferably to a room full of people.

Example of how a guy can talk about a "Conspiracy theory" in a calm and rational manner as an example.

That sort of flat input that text allows is also its weakness. And this is how we can beat this nonsense. I'll use moon landing deniers as an example. You show up at a park with a big ass telescope, you get, um, "interesting" people who stop by and say hello. If you take someone who is convinced that the moon landings never happened and take a 20-lb sledgehammer to that argument, you will lose. Not only will you lose, badly, but the crowd that gathers around you will mentally turn on you as well. You don't attack this stuff head on. You nibble around the edges and let the human brain do the rest of the work. I'm much more patient than many other people in the club so they tend to shove these people my way. This is the curse of competence, right folks? So with the moon landing deniers, you have to get them to think outside of their bubble. And face to face conversations where the "denier," for lack of a better term, can see your emotional state and facial movements as you look them in the eye and talk to them will beat flat text. EVERY TIME. It is a cliche anymore to say that humans are social animals. But its true when it comes to person to person interactions. And there is nothing more powerful than having someone tell you that everything is fine. I joke that I am borrowing cult recruitment ideas but I guess you could say its true.

The lady who came to us asking about the "blood moon" was in tears that things were really bad. I let her talk, told her that this is going to look neat and they happen twice a year on average, and let her look at Saturn through the telescope. Did it help her? Or did she go back to the internet and go back to the sites saying the end of the world is coming be afraid, be afraid? Next Saturday, if my server work goes well and we get a decent night, I'm going to the park again to show Saturn while we can (Saturn gets too close to the sun to look at safely with my telescope at the end of September). Hopefully she will be there and I'll let her tell me what she saw on the internet, and while she is talking I'll find a globular cluster or something to show her and leave her with something wonderful in her brain. I've also had people walk up to us at the park and say "you guys with the telescopes are smart right? let me ask you something!" Having a smart phone and always on LTE is wonderful in situations like that, and if you can teach people how to tell a real person from a charlatan even better. As an aside, I really need to put together my class together for the library on how to google stuff.

It would be wonderful if I could say "change the schools!" or "change the news!" or even "fix poverty!" and make that happen. I can't. None of us can. But what we can do is spread a bit of info, laugh at the fear mongering and clickbait, spread some of the wonder of the universe and the world we live in, and hope it sticks.