Why conspiracy theories are getting more absurd and harder to refute

[David Horn]

(04-14-2019, 02:29 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Do you remember the Iraq War? Where the media praised Bush to no end and made up the fact that Iraq had WMD? Do you remember the Y2K scare where there was this big frenzy and when everyone was talking about how the world would end? Do you remember how the media said there was this giant hole in the ozone layer from hairspray and that all of the rainforests would be cut down rendering us unable to breathe? Do you remember how the media said eggs were bad for you then retracted? How it said to eat all these carbs then retracted? How it pushed margarine? Do you remember how we were told about how we would face all kinds of biological and crop warfare from terrorists and how we could be done for? How now people are saying that climate change is going to make billions of people go extinct? How 24/7 news made people afraid and thinking crime rates are going up when in actuality they're going down and the media frenzy about how everyone is in danger? I'm only a Civic born in 1986 and remember all this.

Almost everything you cite is the media reporting results obtained from others, mostly in the government.  Some of the issues were intentionally hyped,. like the Iraqi WMDs.  Others were inflated due to a lack of knowledge or poor analysis (i.e. computing power -- yes, that was an issue in the not so distant past). Some were results not suited to analysis, like health risks.  Health risks tend to be guesses that are validated over time, or not.  Science isn't perfect, just sequential.  Things are studied, and evaluated, then restudied.  Expect changes as issues are more fully understood.  That's not a conspiracy.  I'll disagree on Y2k, which was hyped, but fairly I think.  The massive response made the issue a ho-hum transition.  Other issues are hyped to generate a similar response, noting how well it worked for Y2k.  That doesn't make them unimportant; they were resolved too.
I'm shocked you mention margarine, since it was already on the decline when you were born.  Margarine was a commercial product that never lived up to commercial claims.  I fault business and the FDA for that, not the media.