Can you give some specifics of #3 just for color? I'm not interested in debating or trolling at all. I'm just curious what people say that does this. Is it just people cheering for Trump or something?
Basically, you just make something up entirely. If you say that 100,000,000 Americans are killed every year in skiing accidents, that's easy to disprove. But if you post a clip of someone getting punched from an obscure 1970s sitcom that only aired in Hungary and then claim it happened at a restaurant in Denver, that's going to be a lot more difficult to disprove even if the claim is extremely dubious unless you're lucky enough to know the original context.
Some of the more common examples of this in recent times include faked tweet screenshots (mildly difficult to disprove as Twitter's search isn't very useful, and the liar can just say "oh they deleted it"), anecdotes about meeting a celebrity and them doing something unacceptable (basically impossible to disprove unless the meeting DID happen but the incident didn't and eyewitnesses can vouch - see also: the Gritty incident), and videos being used to smear a group despite none of the people involved actually being from that group (reverse video search is extremely difficult, and that relies on it being something previously published rather than recorded explicitly for misinformation campaigns).
Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?"
Well... X doesn't cost jobs, X might even create jobs. But now I have to explain that. And if I slow down for even one second, you have an opening to fire off another question or paint me as somehow waffling.
A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...”
This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message.
By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.
The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there.
Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots.
It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.
These days, I'd probably just not respond to bad faith communication, but I've historically enjoyed being horrible. Unlike a politician, you don't have to preserve your own credibility in the eyes of onlookers, so you can just be awful if you want.
I find that there is usually a fairly small number of "gotcha" questions that come up over and over for a particular topic. the "trans people in competitive sports" question in this thread is a good example. what makes these types of questions rhetorically effective is that they're usually at least half-rooted in truth. in my experience it's more effective to recognize the likely gotchas and have a response ready, or better yet, preempt it entirely. at the very least, you should explain why you're not answering the question, lest it appear that you are the one arguing in bad faith. you have to keep in mind that you're not just trying to convince your interlocutor but also your audience.
Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have.
Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.
Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.
I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.
If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias.
I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.
Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing.
So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).
Not only are these viewpoints, which you claim can only be argued in bad faith, supported by empirical evidence, but the people who dare to support them publicly are risking social and financial ruin. If "unsafe" and "marginalized" do not describe their situation, then the words have no meaning.
As a minority from one of the groups at the unflattering end of the crime rate distributions, it is my lived experience that the type of censorship you are advocating for is what makes me feel unsafe.
Inconvenient empirical truths about my community can not be discussed in the sort of polite and caring settings where the seeds of real solutions that don't ignore reality could germinate.
Instead, they can only be discussed in rude and hateful settings.