https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-disinformation-hacks-your-brain/

Three years ago, Edgar Welch sent a text message to a friend announcing he was “Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many.” Two days later, he drove 350 miles to a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong and entered with a .38 revolver and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. He fired shots inside in an attempt to investigate what he believed was a child sex ring with ties to top Democratic Party leaders and sent restaurant patrons and staff fleeing in fear. The sex ring was fake news. The consequences, however, were real. Welch left the premises under arrest and later pled guilty to local and federal weapons charges.


At the time of Welch’s disinformation-driven rampage, “post-truth” had just recently entered the public imagination. A few weeks before Welch’s arrest, Oxford Dictionaries declared it the word of the year. Many people still struggled to understand how a polite, soft-spoken person like Welch could be led so far from reality. But as the disinformation age has continued to develop over the past three years, science has not stood still. It has given us a more detailed picture than ever of the ways that disinformation hacks our truth judgments.