We are in a tough place.
What I trust is that if Trump had serious allegations with evidence, that Republican election officials in Georgia would treat them seriously rather than debunking them in the midst of death threats. Or that some Republican judge, especially one of those nominated by Trump would have allowed a lawsuit to get traction.
Reading the transcript of the call to the SoS, and reading a couple of the legal opinions on one of the lawsuits, is worth more than a million news articles to me. Trump said there were thousands of dead people who voted; the SoS said there were two, in the face of people calling for his execution as a RINO. That's compelling.
I also trust peers with a similar threshold. If none of my intelligent friends and family members with a history of digging deeply into fantastic claims believe the current fantastic claim, I don't tend to feel the need to do such digging myself. If one of them was suddenly making a grandiose claim, I would sit up and notice and have to investigate further.
I choose things to read based on my perception of their average reliability, but I don't assume that something is true because it comes from a good source. If I did, how could I know the source was good in the first place? The causality goes from good articles -> good source, not the other way around.
I just don't think you can give anyone any benefit of the doubt. If you're not forming your opinions bottom-up, you risk getting drawn into a divergent reality like so many people these days.
I'm also reminded of how some people on HN like to mention the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect". You can't expect that smart people automatically know about any random thing, if it doesn't impact their life whether they are right or wrong.
I disagree. There's no way they would have changed their minds. It's just an excuse. A thin veneer of plausible deniability while they willingly keep their heads in the sand. The simple explanation is no one is that stupid, that fascist, but, maybe they are. Maybe this is the effect of a decades long campaign by conservative politicians & pundits to constantly gaslight America & try to keep the electorate uneducated.
Either way, people clinging to these obvious falsehoods are seditious at worst or useful idiots at best.
People generally don’t like to change their minds on deeply held beliefs, and all the falsehoods Trump and Qanon are spreading have become deeply held beliefs for many of those people.
They end up supporting fascists but they won’t realise it until too late.
From a believer's perspective, articles mentioned affidavits, eye-witness testimony, court cases being filed, and important, trusted people saying something along the lines of "there is evidence the courts are not even considering!" Presumably if that same believer dug deep enough into individual court cases and affidavits and statements by the judges dismissing cases, they may have changed their mind.
But I don't dig that deep, and obviously neither do the believers. We are wired to our inclination of confirmation bias. When we are already programmed and motivated to find evidence of what we already believe, we do not tend to exhaust every option possible to validate it. We stop when we cross the smallest of hurdles of validation.