Leaks on internet are information that you probably cannot verify by yourself. So you cannot clarify it as observable fact.
"you can't believe something you know to be false"
Yet, a lot of people believe in things that cannot be proved as fact. And I'm not talking about religious things. Just random information in news, internet, etc. For example there are a quite a lot people who believe in in flat earth, third gender, global warming, alliens or immunity from vaccines, even though they cannot prove it (and I'm not saying it if that is right or not).
I'm just trying to explain you why there are people who don' believe in same things as you do. Or simply find out that information are irrelevant for them.
If leaks are not genuine, then governments simply say so and move on. They're not overly concerned with false stories, these are everywhere. It's not as if they persecute people who make up stories about UFOs in Area 51. They are persecuting Assange, however, and with an unusually malignant ferocity.
Moreover, Arnu wasn't arrested for making up stories about UFOs, so the whole subthread is pointless and cries false analogy.
We can safely close the discussion at this point.
And to continue the false analogy: Yes, I do believe Arnu made actual photos and not imaginary ones and that's why he has been arrested. I very much doubt he would have been arrested for publishing falsified photos of Area 51.
Not to mention, people are perfectly capable of believing in something (whether it's in any way a fact or not, doesn't matter) while still acting rational regarding something else. You'd think that schizophrenic state of mind has to collapse at some point. Yet, in many people, it's perfectly stable, and they live and die without ever confronting the contradiction.
> you can't believe something you know to be false.
Of course you can. The easiest way is to simply ignore the question of falsity completely. Another is to cling to controversies, blowing them out of proportion and invalidating the question that way. There's a conspiracy-theoretic way, too.
I don't know if people are on average more rational than irrational, but I know for sure that every single person can be both rational and irrational at the same time. I'd say this is the natural, innate state of the human mind, even.
Dangerous wording there. The ability to dispute stuff is good, but the facts are the facts, and what we think of the shape of the Earth or whodunnit, doesn't change the actual shape of the Earth, nor who actually did it. And sometimes the evidence is overwhelming enough that disputing it is at best a distraction.
> At the end it's just a personal decision of what you want to believe.
I hope for your own sake that you only want to believe true things. Besides, you don't really have a choice: what "choosing to believe" a false thing even means? If you make that choice it's too late already: you can't believe something you know to be false. Maybe you can persuade yourself that you believe it, but… you don't.
You need to distinguish the political ideal, where it is very important that you do not mandate or forbid people from believing any particular thing, from the rational ideal, where you need to recognise that you don't actually have a say in what you believe. Evidence comes your way, and that evidence is supposed to make you believe things to various degrees. The maths of it (probability theory) is intractable, but it is inevitable.
For instance, if you see a green traffic line you probably don't want to walk across that road just yet.