How Skeptics Confronted 9/11 Denialism
by John Ray [exerpted for brevity]
"Skeptics today bemoan the overwhelming proportion of people who claim to believe in all manner of conspiracy theories from the JFK assassination to the origins of HIV-AIDS. For that reason, it may be worthwhile to take a moment to stop and celebrate one area in which skeptical advocacy has been overwhelming successful: the world of 9/11 conspiracies...
A tragedy on a scale at least comparable to Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination was bound to inspire a conspiracy subculture, but the takeoff success of the viral Internet documentary Loose Change and the movement it created was unprecedented...
Yet, in just under four years, the 9/11 truth movement has ground to a halt. Apart from the fundamental incoherence of their theories, the downfall of the 9/11 denier juggernaut was good old-fashioned skepticism at its finest, the kind that conjures visions of James Randi challenging psychics and faith healers on their home turfs and winning...
Staking their fortunes almost solely on Internet-based content may have been the 9/11 deniers biggest mistake. What seems like a perfect place for pseudoscience the Internet is un-edited, without fact-checkers or minimum publishing standards of any kind also became a perfect place for a rapid-response system of blogs and forums to fight back...
The Internet forced many ground-level 9/11 deniers those who spread the gospel on popular social networking sites like Facebook and in their own blogosphere into a rhetorical corner.
Instantaneous information traps old, well-discussed claims into sheer redundancy. In three years of debating 9/11 deniers, I have encountered almost the exact same laundry list of claims on dozens of occasions. The same resources have been successful in debunking 9/11 myths since their inception, tipping the debate against them..."
Skeptic » eSkeptic » Wednesday, June 4th, 2008