Astronaut Chris Hadfield Offers Helpful Advice For Filtering Out Conspiracy Theories on Social Media

If you wrestle with a pig, the best you can be is a pig wrestler.

Commander Chris Hadfield, the guitar playing, song writing Canadian astronaut and author of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything offered some very good advice about understanding the difference between opinion and fact (i.e. flat Earth theories), particularly in the age of 24/7 social media He also suggested how to filter out the noise of conspiracy theories much in the way that crowds used to do at Speaker’s Corner in London.

On the corner of Hyde Park in London there’s Speaker’s Corner and that used to be the Internet. Where you could go stand there and yell any stupid thing you wanted and if people wanted to gather round and listen that was their choice but if you if you weren’t interested in whatever that person was spouting then you didn’t need to listen. But now internet is sort of turned everything into the speaker’s corner.