(a) a growing knee-jerk rejection of mainstream authorities of all types, including scientists; and
(b) a shift toward following whatever one finds on social media or personally prefers (as opposed to what can be defended with facts).
Both those points ring true with me.
I've been working (less than I should) on my Master's thesis along these lines; looking at the phenomenon of social media "bubbles", "fake news" and the notion of trust and so on.
The crux of my argument is basically that we're seeing a lot of "fringe" theories and conspiracies pick up steam because social media has allowed people a more personalised world-view, a way to live their life without ever being seriously confronted with a contradictory opinion, while at the same time we've seen trust eroded in science, journalism, education and the judiciary, all of which
should stand as arbiters of what is "true".
So we've ended up in an epistemological conflict, where people are able to argue points that have no bearing on objective reality, but have them presented as true - and, an offshoot of that, you can end up with the likes of Cambridge Analytica able to effectively weaponise that state of affairs.
It's absolutely about that knee-jerk response to reject authority - Michael Gove's "people are tired of experts". And when you decide that everything science, or any other authority, says is wrong, then what's right? It's the same instinct that drives conspiracy theorists in ever more deluded directions - it's one thing to say that what the mainstream media says is a lie, it's another to assume that because something
isn't in the mainstream media it must be the truth.
The irritating thing about pseudoscience - I've been reading a lot of '70s articles and essays refuting
Chariots Of The Gods? lately, and see a lot of parallels with Flat Earthers and the like - is that it in one hand rejects science and authority, knowing that in doing so it will draw sympathy from a certain audience, but then they require the trappings of science to justify their argument. They'll draw up vague equations, and present their points in a faux-academic manner, because they want the illusion of credibility, while still wanting the anti-authority label, and the two don't add up.