It depends on who you are talking to. Stories from my side of an argument, totally benign. Stories from the out group should be banned from the public arena because it will change our kids.

But a tool is a tool and what is more interesting is why stories are dangerous. The answer is algorithmic compression. When you employ skepticism in the abstract you can divine atomic truths. But it is impossible to maintain all the atomic truths we have discovered in an immediately useful way. We have to go back over our note carefully. This isn't helpful when you need an immediate response.

Stories use known patterns from the real world to compress information in a way that can both be easily transferred between minds as well as unpacked at a later time.

Over long periods of time stories that coevolve with a culture end up compressing a lot of useful information. No different from DNA. True and useful as not identical but neither are they completely independent parameters. They are have a positive correlation however tenuous.

The best combat to bad stories is to carefully use your discovered bits of atomic wisdom to create better stories. If they are useful they will propagate.

Unfortunately, like in the case of UFO hunters the usefulness of the story is simply as a shibboleth for marginal people to belong to a group.