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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

I have been accused of it in another context, so I sympathize with your frustration, but this concept is not bullshit. It is important that we have a taxonomy of fallacies and troll tactics because that makes it easier to detect them. Regrettably, it also makes it trivial for bad-faith actors to just accuse everyone they dislike of some named troll tactic. The cure is not to stop using names for bad behaviors. Rather, we should have rigor when accusing someone of bad behavior: do not just name the behavior, but describe why the name fits.

Sure, this is no fun, but this whole discussion exists because trolls exist: can we really expect anything pleasant to come out of that premise.

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Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.

Someone is not a "bad-faith" actor for asking precisely the questions that are hard to answer, even if they're using those questions to support a wrong idea.

If you don't have time to answer their questions, don't answer them. If you do have time, you have a good opportunity to expose the falsehood of their ideology. But don't use ad-hominems like "sealioning".

Sure, there are some stupid questions, or questions that come with a false premise, but that's not the same as discounting good questions because they come from an anti-vaxxer.

I think you misread what I said. Check out the end of the first paragraph, as I think it mostly says the same thing you said.

Yes, just saying someone is "sealioning" is lazy at best, trollish on its own at worse (as I have already said in the previous post). Saying "your argument is fallacious *because* of A, B, and C", is pretty much the only way to deal with a troll (besides just banning them from the platform). In the particular example of sealioning: certainly, never assume bad-faith, but after you briefly explain and give references, it is definitely very important to also explain to the person how sealioning is a dangerous tactic - at best, you helped someone be more resilient to sealioning themselves, at worst you lost some time with a troll.

The one thing I would agree on with you: if you come in on a high horse, you have already lost the discussion, no matter whether you are talking with a troll or not.

> Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.

1. Labeling someone a "sealion" doesn't even hinge on their opinion. You seem to have missed the entire concept, and instead interpreted it as a generic dismissive.

2. Uh, you don't get to just call something a "fallacy" because you don't like it (though many others are doing the same thing in this thread).

Sealioning is a reference to the specific disingenuous process of spamming the same low-effort, low-brow, easily-answered questions in every last public forum. It's a basic disinformation technique to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt.

My evaluation is that the original usage of the "sealioning" accusation was indeed as a generic dismissive, and its application was dishonest as well; I don't accept the term as a well-founded descriptor of troll behavior in the first place.

If you look at the original comic[1], the sea lion follows the couple around in public, into their house, and even into their bedroom, without permission; that is what makes the sea lion's behavior bad (criminal, in fact). However, "sealioning" in practice refers to people responding to public internet comments with other public internet comments. To treat the latter like the former is dishonest.

Furthermore, the sea lion is objecting to unsubstantiated criticism of his species, which is a form of bigotry. Imagine people searching Twitter for criticism of, say, their race or religion and arguing back at it. I suspect that 90+% of those who complain about "sealioning" would consider that behavior permissible and probably downright virtuous (and would add that the arguing-back need not be scrupulously polite). I'm frankly surprised that "social justice"-associated people managed to decide that objecting to speciesism was worthy of mockery. I think they just really wanted some term of disparagement for their opponents, and happily accepted this one when it appeared without analyzing it too closely.

[1] http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

Sealioning is to good faith questioning as DDoS is to genuine web traffic.

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