In commemoration of the upcoming Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), President Joe Biden issued a statement praising trans people’s contributions to society and describing actions his administration has taken to counter transphobic bullying and extremism. Additionally, many members of Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also issued their own statements affirming that community health depends on supporting trans people too.

“Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation,” Biden wrote in his statement. “Whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they help America thrive. They deserve, and are entitled to, the same rights and freedoms as every other American, including the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves.”

            • GladiusB@lemmy.world
              4·
              9 months ago

              Legit question. Is sea lioning the same as trolling? Or is it more specific? I have only heard of the term recently.

              • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
                13·
                9 months ago

                It’s a specific form of trolling/bad-faith argument based on this comic. The idea behind sealioning is that you feign politeness and badger someone with seemingly-simple questions (that in reality require spending a sizable amount of time to answer) to get them to try to debate you. This can take the form of asking someone to elaborate a point, or provide citations to support a claim. If the victim takes the bait and responds legitimately, the troll ignores most of the message, claims any citations are invalid for some reason (biased source, misrepresenting what the article says, or just ignoring it exists entirely). The troll then cherry picks a few statements, and asks more questions about those, continuing the cycle, If the victim refers to previous posts, the troll pretends it either didn’t happen or didn’t actually answer their question (it did). If the victim refers to previously linked articles, the troll dismisses them and insists the victim provides “better” articles (that the troll will also dismiss out of hand). If the victim ever tells the troll to fuck off, the troll claims the moral high road and says they just “want a civil discussion” and “reasoned debate” over the topic.

                The goal is something like a reverse Gish Gallop. Where a gish gallop aims to overwhelm the victim with more arguments than can be addressed quickly in the hope that your opponent can’t/won’t take the time to respond and walk away, allowing you to claim victory, sealioning aims to trick the victim into spending hours writing a messages that you can respond to in under a minute with a few simple questions, creating a kind of denial-of-service attack.

                  • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
                    7·
                    9 months ago

                    Yeah, happy to help. Sealioning really fucking sucks, because the only ways to counter it are:

                    • Insult the troll until they go away

                    • Refuse to play their game and give short, pithy responses without doing any research (or not linking the research you did)

                    • Ignore the troll entirely

                    • Copy your response and paste it whenever you see the troll asking the same question (which someone is doing in this very thread)

                    • Create and maintain a collection of ready-to-go arguments with citations that you can copy/paste at the drop of a hat, which is a fair bit of work in of itself

                    In case it’s not obvious, most of the counters for sealioning look almost exactly like trolling itself, and it’s almost impossible to tell a sealion from someone apart looking for a legitimate discussion at first glance–short of keeping track of individual usernames and watching them in multiple threads, the only way to know if someone is a sealion for sure is for at least one person to feed the troll at least one good response. It’s what makes sealioning such an insidious technique, because fighting a sealion almost always results in a lower quality of discussion itself, giving the sealion another type of victory.

              • XTL@sopuli.xyz
                4·
                9 months ago

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

                Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.

                That comic link was good, too.

      • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
        28·
        9 months ago

        Here’s 3 examples from just a single thread that I was a part of not too long ago (I’d have more but I don’t actively save threads/comments regarding this topic so this is from a thread I could find via my replies that wasn’t deleted).

        • maypull@lemmy.ca
          3·
          9 months ago

          the first two certainly appear to be doing it, but without context, it is hard to say. the third explicitly said one is worse

          • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
            4·
            9 months ago

            The context is that it was a thread where people were debating whether people ever say that both sides are the same, which devolved into a debate over whether both sides are the same in some places. I’m not sure how saying they’re like Sarumon vs Sauron is explicitly saying one is worse in the third one, considering this was in response to a meme comparing them to Sarumon vs Gandalf. Aragorn in this comparison is their equivalent of a third party.

              • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
                1·
                9 months ago

                Well I’m trying to avoid sending anyone after the commenters en mass hence why I censored them but if you look in my comment history you can find the thread about a month back.