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Comment by viridian | Hacker News Reader

Citing whataboutism is often used as an intellectually soft way to avoid responding to claims of hypocrisy. It's pretty much always used like you are using it nabla, to sidestep a challenge of hypocritical behavior.

On balance I think "whataboutism" as a defense waters down discourse and encourages tribal side taking. It's possible for two adversarial entities to actually both be wrong, or right, or engage in parallel behavior, so as a criticism it seems to me like a slight of hand trick to immunize one side against claims of hypocritical behavior.

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> Citing whataboutism is often used as an intellectually soft way to avoid responding to claims of hypocrisy. It's pretty much always used like you are using it nabla, to sidestep a challenge of hypocritical behavior.

No, it isn't. At its core, true whataboutism is an deliberate attempt to distract and derail [1] a thread away from its actual subject with charges of national hypocrisy. Derails of all types are definitely things that need to be resisted, because otherwise we'd exhaust ourselves talking about nothing but Donald Trump and the top 10 most controversial American geopolitical activities.

That said, I think there's relatively little true whataboutism, compared to similar derails that are exactly the same in form, except they lack the deliberate intent to derail and distract.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=derailing%20...

What you say is true. And yet, a claim of hypocrisy is also often used to sidestep a charge of indefensible behavior. That, in fact, is what we call "whataboutism".

Now, in this particular case, I don't think it is in fact "whataboutism". But I also think the original comment by techntoke:

> Yet nothing about the American spam accounts doing the same thing in American politics.

is unreasonable. It's just not whataboutism.

Why is it unreasonable? Because in American politics, the American spam accounts are run by the Democratic and Republican parties and various PACs. That can certainly be propaganda and disinformation. But it's not state-backed, which is what we're talking about here. State-backed would be the CIA, say, using these techniques to manipulate American politics.

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