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Showerthought: The moon landing hoax polls and the 6% number that keeps bugging me
I was digging through old Pew Research data from 2019 and found that around 6% of Americans still say the moon landing was faked, which sounds tiny until you remember that is roughly 15 million people. That number stuck with me because it is way bigger than I would have guessed, and it makes me wonder how much of it is real doubt versus people just messing with pollsters. Where do you all draw the line between healthy doubt and a theory that just refuses to die? Curious if anyone has seen a better breakdown of how that 6% splits by age.
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michael6931d ago
The part about people messing with pollsters is worth taking further. Pew has written about this before, and satirical answers tend to cluster in ways real belief does not. A guy who genuinely thinks NASA faked it will usually give you details, a reason, a whole story about the lighting or the Van Allen belts. The person who says "yeah sure, it was faked" and then laughs is a different animal. So that 6% is probably a mix of maybe 2 to 3 points of real belief and the rest noise from people having fun with a stranger on the phone. The age breakdown would help sort that out, since younger folks tend to pick up conspiracy stuff from social feeds as a joke more often than older folks who actually lived through the coverage.
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