Usually when people say "both siding", its more refering to an ad hominem falacy where someone tries to counter an argument by pointing to something bad the other side does that is separate (and hence irrelavent) to the original argument. I dont think that is what the person who you are responding to is doing because what they are saying is directly applicable to the issue at hand.
If it defies orthodoxy, in most cases. At least that's my observation.
Most of the cases where I've seen complaints of "both-sidesing" is about mainstream media coverage that did not dismiss one major faction's position out of hand. Basically, a demand the journalist put on a judge hat and rule for the speaker's side. And it happened in the context of the cultural moment described here: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-bluesky-ization-of-the-ame....
"Neutrality requires that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources. Giving due weight and avoiding giving undue weight means articles should not give minority views or aspects as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views or widely supported aspects. Generally, the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all, except perhaps in a "see also" to an article about those specific views. For example, the article on the Earth does not directly mention modern support for the flat Earth concept, the view of a distinct (and minuscule) minority; to do so would give undue weight to it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...
Usually i would describe it more as giving equal air time to opposing views despite the views not having equal prominance (e.g. In a news article about an eclipse you don't have to give equal air time to a flat earther)
Great question. Are there logical arguments for why both-sidesing/whataboutism is bad, backed up with evidence, and a comparative analysis against arguments that claim it is good? Surely there must be a rational basis for the claim so often made.
Is pointing this out as helpful as coming up with a real solution? No, of course not. But I don't have a real solution, so I'm sharing what I do have, which I think is at least slightly better than nothing even if it's not much better.
I don't think false balance is relevant here, because that's about the question of how to present a controversy to less-informed audiences, which isn't at issue in this case; if you're reading an internet argument then you probably have a decent understanding of how internet arguments tend to go and what makes them go wrong.
No. They don't.
There are plenty of people—some of them right here on HN—who have bought into the idea that these debate-bros are just rationalists persuading people through good-faith argumentation.
That's why the debate bros do this: because it works on a lot of people.
So spreading awareness that they are bad-faith actors actively seeking to spread misinformation and cloud the truth for fun and profit, without any reference to some "other side" that is "just as bad", is very, very necessary.
So I see the axis between the two as one of honesty, not one of closed-mindedness. The actual problem is to move both of them to a more open-minded position, not to balance honest vs. dishonest.
The problem with having an oversensitive trolling detector is that then people can spew arbitrary nonsense and dismiss counterarguments as trolling, and observers don't get a chance to find out that what's being said doesn't withstand scrutiny. The problem with an undersensitive trolling detector is that discourse becomes an endurance contest rather than a test of who's actually right. Hence the need for a well-calibrated trolling detector, or rather, for norms that weight speech according to some reasonable proxy of whether it's the kind of contribution that stands or falls on its merits. This is the challenge.
I think it is good to stand firm in one's moral convictions.
It is also good to try to persuade others through debate of the truth if those convictions.
If other people are not as clear or as firm in their own convictions, they might be interested in listening and being persuaded.
It's part of America's constitution and freedom of speech and belief. Unlike France, for example, where religious speech in public (proselytizing) is an arrestable crime.
This seems to me to be a problem very low on the list of problems. Imagine we lived in a world filled with reasonable sounding people. Some of those people were in fact un-reasonable they just acted reasonable.
Would that world be better or worse then the reality we find ourselves in?