> A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality."

It mainly "too much time of political social media". You can always tell.

What you find is that a lot of people will be repeating talking points and/or catch phrases without putting much thought into it. A lot of this is fed to them by people who are essentially evangelists and many of these people I am convinced are given they talking points, because they all say the same thing at roughly the same time.

> Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway

They can do that if they are getting a decent turnover of new viewers. That doesn't work too well when their fanbase is declining.

If you look into the UFO land which is the worst for this and the most obvious because often the claims are ridiculous. What often happens is that someone will be outright exposed for being a fraud e.g. someone proves that a video was fake. They will then disappear for a few months or maybe a few years. During that time, many more new people would have filtered into the community and many won't look into that person's background.