From my perspective, one of my friends daily posts idiotic, factless garbage in our discord. He doesn't trade stocks but reads Reddit religiously. He constantly

From my perspective, one of my friends daily posts idiotic, factless garbage in our discord. He doesn't trade stocks but reads Reddit religiously. He constantly says he has no investment in either side but what do I think about (Citadel blackmailing Robinhood or some such garbage). I am thoroughly convinced that if he weren't currently jobless and lacking bonus money, he would've bought GME at 300, thinking it was going to the moon. I think the core issue is, there is a significant number of people who only get their news from what is upvoted on Reddit, and what is upvoted on Reddit not only has no correlation with actuality, factuality, or reality, it also follows a lot of really nasty biases due to the upvote system. For example, another chat I'm in with a lot of Europeans had this one Portuguese guy last March posting daily fear mongering about the US burning down from Covid. I finally figured out after a week of it that all his headlines were coming from the Covid subreddit. I went and looked, the top 80 stories were all US based. No mention of Italy, Spain, UK, or any other European countries who were having similar rates at the time. I'm not convinced this guy even realized Covid existed in Europe at the time. The moral of the story is, if you're going to try to form an opinion on something you know nothing about, you NEED to consider at least 2 different positions, and a lot of these people who fell into the conspiracy trap only considered 1. (And yes, even though Reddit is an aggregator, it is just 1 source).