How do I fight "alt facts"

You can't debate with a racist, they'll make up whatever facts they need to.

Ask Questions. Don't necessarily be adversarial because that just puts people on guard. If you make it seem like you're genuinely curious about their points, then you can strike up some dialogue. Additionally, don't expect people to come around immediately, rather, attempt to plant seeds of doubt with the hope they sprout later on in the future.

So for example, counter

melanin has been linked with aggression

With something like,

That's interesting, do you know what the melanin level differences were between, say, the Viking berserkers and the people they pillaged?

And so on.

This post has some good ideas.

Personally I think it helps to look up the source (if any is provided) to see what it actually says. If you look at my comment from the post above, the meme cites a paper that literally begins by contradicting the meme's point.

By approaching the racist, taking out your [censored by admins] and putting it in [censored by admins] and [censored by admins].

You can't fight "alt-facts" - they're not facts at all. They're mirages, delusions, made-up. And no amount of actual facts is going to change their minds, because their "alt-facts" exist for the express purpose of re-enforcing their world-view, and not the other way around. Generally, I just mock them - they believe their "facts" entitles them to be taken seriously, which, of course, it doesn't. I mock their paranoia, their fear, their pseudo-science. And I don't do it to convince them - I do it for others who may read those "alt-facts", and know that it's worthy of nothing but mockery.

Most of the time the sources they use don't exist, don't support their claims, or are fabricated. You'll just have to do some research and learn the real truth. The FBI found that aliens(all no citizens including illegal and legal immigrants, visitors, and refugees) have the same crime rate as natural citizens. The crime rates of colored communities have been steadily decreasing since the 80's. College enrollment rates have been going up. Only 28% of crime is attributed to African-Americans, not 50%. This info wont help though. They don't care about the truth, they learned their beliefs socially and they will continue to be white supremacists as long as they are circle jerking in their right-wing echo chambers.

you don't debate a fash, you bash them.

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I would like to see more encouragement for scientists to publish data to open forums like openreview.net. That particular site feels like it misses the mark of what I am hoping for, but that seems like a good first step.

By publishing studies in the open - not in paywalled scientific journals, reviewed by 2-3 individuals and criticism/support scattered among dozens of blogs across the internet - but in an open interface, free to any and all where comments and responses (likely from verified scientists in the field - and possibly heavily moderated valuable comments from amateurs), both critical and supportive, are consolidated in a single location.

It creates a location where laypeople can read a particular study, access the data and methods, read the criticism and supporting comments from other scientists in the field and (possibly) get an actual grasp of what the scientific view of that paper truly is - not what random bloggers and the media say that it is. Imagine a system where scientists would review studies in their field, giving ratings on Scope, Methodology, Comprehensiveness, etc to create a grade or score that reflects the quality of the study and its contribution to science.

Because I've seen some bad studies that get published by some journals and instead of admitting they let slip a bad study through, do everything in their power to defend it and deflect criticism. (Here's a similar story)

I'd like to see something like this as a way to reduce the amount of he-said, she-said when it comes to whether a study is "worthless" or "definitive".

Something that worked with me recently, or at least I feel like it worked, is look at the methodology. How was this information gathered. Was it quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative data doesn't really offer an explanation and people like to find all kinds of wacky correlations to provide explanations that aren't necessarily accurate, but they fit the data provided so it's easy to convince others and what not.

Qualitative, on the other hand, data is going to be more human and capture the real lived experience of the people participating in the study. It puts a human face to the data. We're talking about humans after all.

Maybe this is good. The thing that I remember from reading Plato is that it seemed like Socrates never really succeeded in convincing many of the people he was arguing with, but I think that many of the readers tended to end up agreeing with Socrates or maybe that was just my experience of it. I also read that it takes a person three years to change their mind about things. I'm going to ramble for a bit... I was on twitter twittering at somebody that was blaming the local leftist party for all the woes, child poverty and what not and saying how it's all the leftist party's fault (while it's probably more due to colonization). I wasn't defending the party, but saying how the now in power right wing party is only cutting funding for programmes that help the poor. And this man was sharing pictures of charts and things that showed child poverty increased in more recent years when the leftist party was in power and how the right wing party was going to lessen the poverty with austerity measures. Yeah, right? I said the province should do a study to look at the actual causes for poverty. He said there's been studies already and tried to overwhelm me with five all at once. So I skimmed through them and found the conclusion that these studies arrived at was to increase funding for people in poverty. Well, I brought this up to him. He shared these studies with me after all, but when I said this he was like "I'M NOT FOR GIVING A MAN A FISH". So yeah. Not a rational person. You can't expect to change the minds of people, even with the data that they've provided to you. But it's important, I think, to have these discussions as more of a performance art, because you never know who is watching that you might convince.

combination of fact-checking and ideology checking--it's not enough to just say "that's not true", you also have to say why it's racist. then again you don't need to debate them all, if you know someone who's starting to get into it it's worth trying but many alt-shite types are deliberately trying to fly under the radar. for sources + a look at the common patterns of alt-shite arguments shaun and jen on youtube is a good channel which has a series of factcheck videos for famous alt-shite youtubers, contrapoints and hbomberguy have some ok videos along the same lines too, i mention them because iirc the ppl who run all those channels are all lefties/at least not liberals

You misunderstand, I agree that just because one number is higher, doesn't mean that specific demographic is inherently violent, or prone to criminality, or whatever bs the supposed "race realists" say. I simply mean that if you look at the stats, and a certain people are committing a much higher percentage of a certain crime than everyone else, then it's not unreasonable to think that there might be a issue at hand, whether that be actual oppression, poverty, or something else. And yeah the war on drugs is bs, fully agree with you there

On the internet? Nothing you can do, really. That is, if you actually value your time. The best thing you can do is to turn off the computer and get organised. There are lots of anti-racist, anti-establishment or leftist groups out there, and they all need every capable hand they can get. Get out there and get heard.

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These statistics about crime and incarceration with regards to race (ethnicity) are true. Hard to argue against the US Department of Justice, or the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

As with any statistics though, the intepretation is up to discussion, and correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

Why would an anarchist care about racism? Anarchy is the abolition of the state and all state created concepts like "race" or "gender" thus caring about racism for an anarchist is nonsense.