This site is for us to share our research with others. "Always verify" makes sense as a precaution, but "Do your own research" just sounds lazy and really isn't helpful.
Not everyone can "monitor the situation" to the degree of rigor that thorough research requires. Many are still waging a daily war of just trying to survive among crippling debt and overwhelming inflation. Some use GAW simply to help filter out the excess noise on X (since most posts here are just reposts of stuff from X anyway).
Please be mindful that many are not as blessed with their free time as you might be.
Here's the issue.
If someone makes a claim (especially one that is controversial or just over the top) and says they have evidence of this, then they need to provide that when asked. Especially if someone says something like "I looked everywhere for that info and couldn't find anything near what you're claiming. Could you share your sources?".
I can't count the number of times this has happened to me. Someone making some unbelievable claim, I go look into it, everything I find is saying the opposite and I go back to the other person asking for their sources, explaining everything I'm finding says the opposite and get "Do your own research!". Obviously I just did, and that research says you're wrong. The vast majority of the time this has happened and I've finally wrangled those "sources" from the other person, it's invariably from something like some random ass person's blog that no one has ever heard of and who is just saying it without any source of evidence it's true. 🙄
But there are also way too many people here who have zero idea or motivation to look up anything themselves. Like they have never even heard of a search engine and haven't the foggiest idea of how to look up basic information like what the US Constitution says, for example. Or how many states are in the US. 🤦♀️
That's just embarrassing for a place that claims to be an elite research board.