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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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politics
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Textbook sealioning.
Legit question. Is sea lioning the same as trolling? Or is it more specific? I have only heard of the term recently.
It's a specific form of trolling/bad-faith argument based on this comic. The idea behind sealioning is that you feign politeness and badger someone with seemingly-simple questions (that in reality require spending a sizable amount of time to answer) to get them to try to debate you. This can take the form of asking someone to elaborate a point, or provide citations to support a claim. If the victim takes the bait and responds legitimately, the troll ignores most of the message, claims any citations are invalid for some reason (biased source, misrepresenting what the article says, or just ignoring it exists entirely). The troll then cherry picks a few statements, and asks more questions about those, continuing the cycle, If the victim refers to previous posts, the troll pretends it either didn't happen or didn't actually answer their question (it did). If the victim refers to previously linked articles, the troll dismisses them and insists the victim provides "better" articles (that the troll will also dismiss out of hand). If the victim ever tells the troll to fuck off, the troll claims the moral high road and says they just "want a civil discussion" and "reasoned debate" over the topic.
The goal is something like a reverse Gish Gallop. Where a gish gallop aims to overwhelm the victim with more arguments than can be addressed quickly in the hope that your opponent can't/won't take the time to respond and walk away, allowing you to claim victory, sealioning aims to trick the victim into spending hours writing a messages that you can respond to in under a minute with a few simple questions, creating a kind of denial-of-service attack.
Cool. Thanks.
Yeah, happy to help. Sealioning really fucking sucks, because the only ways to counter it are:
Insult the troll until they go away
Refuse to play their game and give short, pithy responses without doing any research (or not linking the research you did)
Ignore the troll entirely
Copy your response and paste it whenever you see the troll asking the same question (which someone is doing in this very thread)
Create and maintain a collection of ready-to-go arguments with citations that you can copy/paste at the drop of a hat, which is a fair bit of work in of itself
In case it's not obvious, most of the counters for sealioning look almost exactly like trolling itself, and it's almost impossible to tell a sealion from someone apart looking for a legitimate discussion at first glance--short of keeping track of individual usernames and watching them in multiple threads, the only way to know if someone is a sealion for sure is for at least one person to feed the troll at least one good response. It's what makes sealioning such an insidious technique, because fighting a sealion almost always results in a lower quality of discussion itself, giving the sealion another type of victory.
There seems to be one other problem too. Someone can legitimately be inept. There is no real proof that someone doesn't feel that way and is acting in good faith and just cannot comprehend what is being discussed.
Thanks for the break down.