“Kasey let her mum talk about her theories and occasionally asked probing questions, but otherwise didn’t engage. She didn’t know it at the time, but the flat Earth poster was the first sign her mother was drifting away from her friends and family. ‘My mum said that she felt for the first time in her life that she’d found her tribe of people where she really belonged. It was her coming out moment.'” It can be hard to hear your mum thinks the Earth is flat. But saving a loved one from conspiracy theories is possible. “Confronting people too directly runs the risk of expecting them to admit their entire worldview is wrong and having them shut down the conversation … We’ve seen this year how some COVID-deniers in the US go so far as to angrily maintain their belief that the virus is fake right up to their dying breath.”