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I use "virtue signaling" for something like:

3. Advocacy that mainly serves to make the advocate sound virtuous rather than substantively address the difficult aspects of a difficult tradeoff or help to wisely deploy resources in a way that will make progress on a problem.

It's distinct from your 1 in that it accepts that people can exist who legitimately care about improving the world.

It's distinct from your 2 in that it doesn't assert the person's advocacy is dishonest (or otherwise not heartfelt), only that their specific contributions are unhelpful or present a bad framing.

Example of a useful difference that 3 highlights:

Virtue signaling: "I just think we should help everyone wherever we can." -> suggests that the speaker is particularly noble while also setting a herculean standard for how to live one's life. (Really? Every single moment?)

Not virtue signaling: "As a rule of thumb, you should give about 10% of your net income to charitable causes, since this is historically feasible, and mainly would force you to cut back in ways that have disproportionately high utility for others. Any more than that is nice, but is more than I can legitimately ask." -> recognizes upper bounds in what they expect out of others, and what might be feasible or excessive.

Naturally, most advocacy lasts more than two sentences, but that gives the general idea.

I feel like the term virtue signaling is used in a way that almost always implies some implication of insinceerity, i.e. they are doing it for popularity/upvotes/etc and not out of moral concern. As such i agree with the other poster that it is in essence an ad hominem, although usually its not solely an ad hominem but combined with some argument that the advocacy is superficial or ineffective. (Although typically on the internet its a pretty weak argument most of the time)

To me, writing off a stance as "virtue signaling" is the same kind of laziness as writing off a stance as coming from a "position of privilege": it may well be true, but rational debate requires assuming your debate partners came to their position through reasoned thought and honestly hold it.

> it may well be true, but rational debate

Rational debate is not the virtue signaler's goal or means. They just want to flaunt a "holier than thou" attitude while actually caring zero about the topic. Demanding that those targeted by virtual signaler's passive-agressive's attacks must not point out the virtue signaler's inherent dishonesty is like complaining that the targets must passively serve the the virtue signaler's desires without a hint of rational or objective thought, as if the only acceptable outcome of a virtue signaler's attack is getting the target to publicly recognize how the virtue signaler is so virtuous and that the world should follow his teachings, no matter how empty and inconsequent and self-aggrandizing they might be.

Honestly I think the real chilling effect is from internet people patrolling an monitoring everyone's use of language and making sure people are only saying the "correct" words and ideas.

That's fair. Do you think I am causing one with this comment?

Yes.

When someone suggests an action whose visibility is so far out of proportion to its efficacy, this should call their integrity into question. Whether consciously or otherwise, they are proposing to take advantage of the movement for their own personal benefit; we should view them with the same skepticism as someone suggesting that group funds should be used to renovate the meeting place, which they just happen to own.

I agree with your two possibilities (and there are more). What I'm not clear about is why you object to the use of the phrase for either of those reasons.

1. If someone genuinely believes something absurd to be right and reasonable, why are they above criticism? Ridicule is a very valuable and effective tool in maintaining social cohesion and resisting subversive methods that use absurd arguments that are unworthy of or incapable of being reasoned against.

2. This is far more straight forward. If we genuinely believe someone to be disingenuous in their advocacy of the absurd, should they not be called out on it? What responsibility do we have to earnestly engage with deliberate subversion? Identifying it and raising awareness of bad actors and trolls is a valid defence, potentially saving good people a lot of time, money, and heartache.

I'll conclude by saying that I believe your attempt to dissuade people from using "virtue signalling" to identify these behaviours is, itself, virtue signalling. I'm quite sure it would serve your sociopolitical objectives very well if all these people 'in the way' would stop noticing such behaviours.

It doesn't seem like you are objecting to the term so much as the idea it represents. If the original poster instead substituted in the meaning of that term, e.g. if they said instead "This is taking insincerly aligning yourself with socially progressive causes in a trivial fashion in order to gain social standing while avoiding taking a stand on things that matter,to an extreme"* I assume you would still want to object? If so you should object to what they are saying not how.

*The term virtue signaling seems to be used differently by different people, so not sure if that was a fair substitution of definition.