...gets marginalised. This has always been true in research. But now that we can all do research, of an OSINT sort, this is happening more.
Usually when amateur researchers try to engage with and/or question the consensus/professional researchers, they are met with silence. Even when they point out good evidence; that you might call "inconvenient truths".
I've worked in academia so I have sympathy; you get plenty of approaches from true crackpots [0]. Researchers/academics/professional need to learn to better engage with the amateurs, and those peers they marginalise, who genuinely try to contribute to the debate.
or write a book (or books) or manufacture a miracoulous ointment "that bigfarma doesn't want you yo know about" and get rich appealing to those people that are or feel marginalized because they actually are border-line psycos or are members of a weaker segment of the population.
that has always been true in pseudoscience ("snake oil" comes from a real product of the 1800s) but now this is happening more.
I think this is part of the trap that believers fall into: the idea that if you can’t disprove it, then it might be true, and if it might be true, then a fun game of connect-the-dots begins.
Of course, an infinite number of things might be true, so the actual conspiracy theories that people choose to believe in start to be driven by their personality and social network. That’s why we hear about lizard-people but not, say, the equally plausible echidna-people.
Any theory that requires millions of people to systematically lie and hide evidence, with little to gain, across the whole world, and for many decades, is extremely unlikely.
Someone who believes in it with just a bit of money could surely fly up and sample the air inside of one of the trails, for example.
Calling someone who is doing actual research that doesn’t go with the grain of consensus a conspiracy theorist is surely wrong, but I see a lot more of the former (Surprising thing X must be true because it somehow advantages my tribe or makes me special) on the internet than the latter (Surprising thing X must be true because I did research and the data is not matching up as you’d expect).