Help.
This post
https://steemit.com/nature/@fyrstikken/chemtrails-killed-the-honey-bees
Got 7oo dollars. This post is lies. This post is 100% conspiracy nut pulling things out of thin air. Chemtrails don't exist. They're widely debunked. To quote Astronomer Bob Berman:
"The conspiracy web sites think the phenomenon started only a decade ago and involves an evil scheme in which 40,000 commercial pilots and air traffic controllers are in on the plot to poison their own children."
The entire thing is nothing more than people looking at plane contrails and exhaust and thinking it's some sort of poison from the government. Why exactly the government wants to mass poison its own citizens, they never seem to say. Similarly, while the disappearance of bees is a problem, exactly what does the government have to gain by ruining their own capacity to grow crops? Whats the plan there? How are the shadowy Illuminati gonna make money off of destroying their own economic capacity?
Not to mention the fact that air dropping particulate matter as a weapon ISN'T EFFECTIVE. The US government tried it with anthrax and found out that it just dispersed so widely that it wasn't effective and was almost impossible to predict from only a few thousand feet, let alone the roughly 40,000 feet that planes generally cruise at. After that we tried dropping bombs of the stuff, which actually worked to a degree because of the unique structure of anthrax...but I'm getting off topic. Dropping poison as a mist from 40,000 isn't an effective method of doing anything other than wasting a lot of poison mist.
And then we have this post.
https://steemit.com/steem/@sirwinchester/the-hidden-power-inside-yourself-how-to-achieve-your-goals-by-visualization
This post is about how you have a gland in your head that allows you to be a psychic except that the government is poisoning you with fluoridated water! I wrote a frankly stupidly long post on why all that was lies.
https://steemit.com/steem/@ecto/the-hidden-power-inside-yourself-debunked
Which no one read, of course.
Then I had a small argument with a guy who thought that the moon landings were faked because of his ruthless paranoia toward television. And then another lady who claimed to be a psychic.
Is this where steemit is going? Are we gonna be that internet place where we give people hundreds of dollars for saying that 9/11 was a government plot or that Vaccines are causing autism? Because I really don't want to be part of that. Because these things are not a matter of opinion, they are demonstrably wrong and are actively spreading false information and building a climate of terrified and ignorant people. And that has consequences. Those anti-vaccers have lead to the resurgence of previously nearly extinct diseases. They put themselves and their children and the general public at risk because they choose to believe the mad ramblings of some jerk's blog or some celebrity advocate whose only qualification is being famous. And I don't want steemit to be the place where some mid-western mom sees a 900 dollar story about how Chemo is actually big pharma poison designed to kill cancer patients and yank her child out of treatment because she correlated those 900 dollars with the article being valid.
I'm not saying we should stop them from speaking. They have the right to believe whatever stupid garbage they want. I just don't want them to be rewarded for it, because as soon as you start rewarding them, you're reinforcing that behavior, you're making it a trend. People trying to make some money off steem will see it and try to copy it. And that scares the crap out of me; because I don't really want Steemit associated with 9/11 deniers, fringe wackos, and con artists.