And one of the sides has to be right. Sometimes the facts are difficult to ascertain, but so many of the lies spread via social media are easily disproved by consulting primary sources.
"If you accept X then we need to do Y."
"I don't think we should do Y"
"Then you reject facts."
Something everyone seems to have forgotten is that intelligent, well-informed, people of good will can look at the same facts and come up with different policy prescriptions.
(Edit) This doesn't mean I don't believe in truth, right/wrong etc... it means that I'm constantly balancing what's most likely to be trueish - subject to higher quality information at a later time.
A policy choice is the linkage of a fact to a particular goal; while few policy choices are so simple as to admit of a binary choice, you can certainly rank them on a gradient.
Of course, it helps if your goal is clearly definable and you maintain awareness of consistency. Otherwise, a goal of, say, improving life expectancy might be satisfied by a eugenics policy which made unpersons of those with medical conditions that would lower life expectancy.
To go even further, people may agree on the 'what' of a goal, but disagree on the 'why' of a goal, which very much inform what policy choices they are amenable.
- both sides are wrong
- the participants are unwittingly talking past each each other
Etc.
Some have called this increased polarization.
I see it as a slide towards violent authoritarianism.
I wish this were true. I used to post snopes links and primary sources to Baby Boomer posts on Facebook, but it's hopeless. They either don't trust the fact-check, can rationalize it away, or just don't care. One of the most shocking realizations of my adult life has been learning that a very large portion of my otherwise high-functioning friends will believe anything, no matter how crazy or self-contradictory, if it reinforces their sense of self-righteousness.
Not necessarily. In the US one of our presidents taught us a long time ago that "both may be" wrong, and "one must be" wrong.