My experience on lemmy is that the facts are secondary. It's a slight exaggeration, but if you don't support someone, you have to oppose everything they do or you are some big supporter of them. If you point out some criticism of them is not based in fact, it's "why would you defend them?"
It's much easier if the world is black and white and you're in a bubble that agrees with that. And so they'll attack anything that upsets this uniform simplicity.