Rant: I started keeping a spreadsheet of every claim in a moon landing thread and the numbers got weird
Back in January I got into a huge argument in a Facebook group about the moon landing and instead of just yelling back I made a little spreadsheet. I logged 14 claims from the other side over two weeks, and I marked each one as sourced, unsourced, or flat out wrong. What surprised me was that 9 of the 14 were unsourced and 3 had sources that didn't even say what the person claimed, like a YouTube link that was just a guy talking over a slide. The weird part is when I posted the spreadsheet with calm notes, two people actually said thanks and one admitted he had just copied his list from an old forum thread. I learned that most of these debates aren't about facts at all, they're about people repeating stuff they heard somewhere and never once checking. Now I keep the sheet for every big thread I get into and it keeps me from typing angry replies at 1am. Has anyone else tried tracking claims like this, and did it actually change how the argument went or just make things worse?