I recently received an email from my father with a link to a shady article about COVID-19. It was fairly long and contained lots of extremely technical medical facts. The article was difficult to immediately disprove, because it contained so much factual, yet irrelevant information.
I was able to explain to my dad why it was logically flawed, but it was impossible to convince the author that their article should be retracted. When I identified the source of the author's factual medical information, it was clear they had simply omitted the opening statements from a research paper that established the hypothesis was likely not applicable to the problem at hand. When I found the researcher, they were in the awkward position of defending their research from people attacking the factual parts of the derived article.
I was able to explain to my dad why it was logically flawed, but it was impossible to convince the author that their article should be retracted. When I identified the source of the author's factual medical information, it was clear they had simply omitted the opening statements from a research paper that established the hypothesis was likely not applicable to the problem at hand. When I found the researcher, they were in the awkward position of defending their research from people attacking the factual parts of the derived article.