My brother frequently demands a source when I tell an anecdote, then misuses Hitchen's Razor to accuse me of making the anecdote up. This would be understandable if it was as a pics or it didn't happen response to something outlandish, but it's usually for something entirely mundane that was barely interesting enough to mention in the first place.
The key phrase for primary sources is "trust, but verify". That means listening to the primary source, and then do the legwork yourself to verify. Verify doesn't mean asking the primary source for a source, it means figuring it out for yourself. A claim like "they're eating the pets" gets readily debunked as soon as you start looking for evidence.
That approach may work for journalism and such, with a single person collecting primary sources and verifying them before writing an article. However, it does not work on the internet.
Instead of one person verifying the claim and adding further sources in an article, every single reader would have to do it. And anyone using the internet would have to do so hundreds of times every day. Nobody does that. It only makes sense to shift the burden of further proof onto the primary source or disregard it.
You're allowed to post what you find. The most effective method for cutting through the mis-/dis-info is to both respond directly with evidence, and then talk past it as a cool thing you just learned in a new post
It is if I can trust you. The reality is i can't. So if you have claims and its important for you to ensure i understand or accept your input then you better be able to back it up or I won't.
If you were 'there' then prove that.
There are a lot of scenarios where it is just not important to have acceptance or agreement from the other party so it's not like this is a universal rule. But if you have to rely on 'trust me' then you have to accept that some people simply wont.
Look there are some wild claims that deserve a request for sources.
Outside of that I would think you can check it out on your own if you don't already know. How is it that this "do your research" crowd doesn't know how to do their own research?
If you make a statement of fact then you need to be able to back it up with objective facts.
If you can’t, then it’s called opinion
And a second asbsolutelyfuckingnot. Why?
Because there is a torrent of utter bullshit posted online every day. The burden to prove it’s bullshit should not be placed on the recipient of the information. Why, again? Because it’s easy to flood everything with bullshit and takes effort to disprove. You cannot allow people to make statements without facing the burden of proving their position, otherwise nobody is going to be checking anything and the bullshitters win.