To find out more about the Facebook Science subreddit and the community behind it, Bored Panda spoke with its only moderator named Yunners. “The genesis of the sub came from a YouTuber called Aron Ra that featured a video on the Ken Hamm Facebook page and the comments found therein. Hamm is a Christian fundamentalist that tries to teach children that the world is only 6000 years old and takes the Bible literally. Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, everything,” the moderator explained.

.“Obviously a lot of that is at odds with scientific consensus, so as you can imagine, his Facebook page is full of the most gibberish claptrap you're likely to find anywhere, and his followers just lap it up.” This is what gave Yunners the idea to start a subreddit that collects similar posts across all social media to highlight the sheer amount of misinformation out there.

The moderator added that “Initially it was to laugh at idiotic ideas that people have about the shape of the Earth, weird home remedies and other nonsense pseudoscience beliefs that people buy into.”

When asked why, in their view, so many people believe in false pseudoscientific things, Yunners believes that it can be any number of things. Like, “problems with the education systems, issues with critical thinking ability, fundamentalist religious upbringing, creationism being sold as a 'science' in Bible Belt America doesn't help things either, etc.”

When the pandemic started, The World Health Organization announced another endemic—the infodemic, which is basically when too much information, including false or misleading information, is propagated in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.

We asked Yunners if they have seen any of this shared on the subreddit. “Absolutely! When the pandemic hit, a lot of the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists came out of the woodwork to spew any and all beliefs they had,” the mod said and added that “Unfortunately a lot of these people had prominent positions in the media and politics, so they already had a platform and followers to lap it up.”

According to Yunners, spreading pseudoscientific statements is essentially harmful. “All it takes is the wrong person to risk their life based on this newfound information, next thing you have flat Earthers killing themselves in homemade rockets to try and disprove the globe, anti-vaxers refusing covid vaccines and dying from it as a result, then you have the new-age healers that drink their own urine or try to survive on air alone, causing physical damage to themselves.”

The creator of the subreddit added that “There's definitely a problem with responsibility (or lack thereof) when it comes to sharing pseudoscience as fact.”

“I think education is part of the problem,” the moderator said. “Another issue is that once you start down the rabbit hole, you start to distrust any official source of information because of the Illuminati, Freemasons, Reptilians or whatever the flavor of the week is for the conspiracy nuts,” they concluded.