this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
402 points (97.2% liked)

Tumblr

213 readers
378 users here now

Welcome to /c/Tumblr

All the chaos of Tumblr, without actually going to Tumblr.

Rule 1: Be Civil, Not CursedThis isn’t your personal call-out post.

  • No harassment, dogpiling, or brigading
  • No bigotry (transphobia, racism, sexism, etc.)
  • Keep it fun and weird, not mean-spirited

Rule 2: No Forbidden PostsSome things belong in the drafts forever. That means:

  • No spam or scams
  • No porn or sexually explicit content
  • No illegal content (don’t make this a federal case)
  • NSFW screenshots must be properly tagged

If you see a post that breaks the rules, report it so the mods can handle it. Otherwise just reblog and relax.

founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 66 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (25 children)

Part of the issue is that online, it's often hard to tell the difference between someone who is genuinely asking questions and someone who is asking questions in bad faith. The (relative) anonymity between people is definitely a hindrance here, you can often not easily tell if the person you're talking to is 15 or 30.

[–] tlmcleod@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Could you give me an example of this asking questions in bad faith? I've heard it before but I just can't wrap my head around what it means. Questions are questions and answers are answers. I'm of the opinion that unless it's in private messages, even answering troll questions with earnest is useful as public comments have an audience.

[–] Seleni@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Look up ‘sealioning’, ‘ad hominem’, ‘Chewbacca defense’ for starters. You will see these techniques show up quite often in bad-faith debates. You’ll also see a lot of goalpost-moving and general logical fallacies.

If you want to see it in action, watch videos of Charlie Kirk’s ‘debates’; he uses all of these to ‘question’ in bad faith—in other words, not to learn things, but to prove himself right at any cost. For a good analysis video of common right-wing behavior of this style, watch The Card Says Moops by The Alt-Right Playbook.

What I do is call out the bad-faith technique they’re doing in my response. If they try to move the goalposts (the ‘gish gallop’ technique is the speedrun version of this), I pull the goalposts back. It isn’t enough to point out the fallacies in the arguement; you also need to point out how they’re using bad-faith techniques too, so people who don’t have as much debate literacy can learn what patterns to look for, not just what answers.

EDIT: For an easy start, there’s actually a very clumsy attempt at a bad-faith argument in this thread

They make a false equivalence argument, where they try to equate removal of religious symbols from classrooms with the removal of religious names people have in an attempt to discredit the idea of keeping religious iconography out of schools.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

If it were obvious from a single example, it wouldn't work. The goal of bad faith discussion is to make the other party engage in good faith, and they won't do that unless they think you're also acting in good faith. Once they're engaging, you can do things like waste loads of their time (it takes much less time to spout some dumb bullshit than explain why it's dumb bullshit), persuade bystanders that you're right by arguing with more logical fallacies and unreliable sources than they can point out, and make it look like they're being unreasonable by sealioning.

[–] theparadox@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

Once they're engaging, you can do things like waste loads of their time (it takes much less time to spout solve dumb bullshit than explain why it's dumb bullshit), persuade bystanders that you're right by arguing with more logical fallacies and unreliable sources than they can point out, and make it look like they're being unreasonable by sealioning.

Bad faith debate/discussion is something I see more and more from the right. It seems that they've now grown an entire ecosystem that can manufacture plausible support for anything they might need to get what they want.

General or scientific consensus on a topic? The consensus is just greedy establishment types trying to maintain funding - a conspiracy. Why else would we have a number of scientific papers/books/academic works from think-tanks with generic, helpful-sounding names brave enough to publish opinions that are contrary to the alleged consensus? We've even had success lawsuits strategically worded and filed strategically in specific districts, decided in our favor by judges we recommended!

[–] phx@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

"I'm just asking the question" has become popular with various groups that don't have counter-facts. Instead, they couch statements as questions or use them to chip away at opposing, reasonable arguments. No answer to the question (other than the one they intended) will ever be accepted, and facts will just raise more questions or moved goalposts. Then, when these people finally get shut down or yelled at for being jackasses, they claim persecution.

It was a VERY popular tactic with anti-vaxxers or pro-Russians on social media before Facebook etc became mostly a bot-populated desert.

load more comments (21 replies)