It's mostly stupidity and blind faith IMO. Most of those posts are reshares and its hard to find who actually was the first to refer to a paper. I once saw suc

It's mostly stupidity and blind faith IMO. Most of those posts are reshares and its hard to find who actually was the first to refer to a paper. I once saw such a claim from antivaxers on Facebook and decided to try and read the paper although I'm not an epidemiologist... So first of all the paper was behind a paywall, second, it was written in Spanish (which I and the poster do not read), third, already in the abstract it said the opposite of what the Facebook poster claimed... It's all just a waste of energy really. They just search for titles that sound like they support them and do not bother considering who wrote it, where was it published, or even what does it say in the abstract. It seems that no one is even close to actually reading a paper and evaluating its merits.