What techniques do bad faith users use online to overwhelm other users in online discussion and arguments?

One I see people use frequently and I’m not sure they realize it’s a bad argument is the fallacy of relative privation.

“X is bad. We should do something to fix X.”

“Y is so much worse. I can’t believe you want to fix X when we need to fix Y.”

Both X and Y can be bad and need to be fixed. Fixing one doesn’t preclude fixing the other.

An alternate form of this is:

“A is bad”

“B is worse, so A is fine.”

Whataboutism

"Russia invaded ukraine! Putin must be held accountable!"

"Yeah well what about Iraq, 2003???"

Is there a name for the thing where you'll make an argument with like 3 distinct points supporting it, and the other person will attack only one, and claim the whole thing is in their favor?

Like, "You can't cast two leveled spells in a turn, and you're silenced, and you're out of spell slots, so you can't cast another fireball"

"No, I have another spell slot from my ring. Fireball time!"

Check out Rational Wiki's page on logical fallacies https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

"Thought-terminating clichés"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché

Also... I don't think it has a name, but dubiously claiming any of these examples in an argument. Maybe it'd just be called "deflection".

I've seen so many valid arguments shutdown as whataboutism, sealioning, concern trolling when they were valid arguments. It's just as much bullshit as actually doing any of those things.

After an event happens, many people convince themselves they saw it coming all along even if they had no idea.

Everyone is an expert on everything... Worse now because of LLMs

Phrasing something as protecting children... The ultimate form of manipulation

You forget the most common one of all, lying.

Innuendo studios has a nice series of videos on this on YouTube

The one I see the most is just playing dumb and pretending not to understand basic things

Fallacy accusations.

When someone does not want to argue about your points they will attack the way you used to made them. If you check hard enough you can find fallacies in most online conversations. So if someone wants they could easily accuse anyone of making this or that fallacy. Some of them being also kind of subjective. Was this a valid example or was it a strawman?

They would just change the debate subject and put you on the defensive defending yourself of making fallacies.

I just usually point out this attitude and end the debate when this happens.

I'll give you a huge one.

Purity tests (when cosplaying as liberals). If a person isn't super-duper liberal on every single issue then you can't support them.

There's tons of this on this very site. People who will tell you they'll stay home and not vote for someone, if they only support 80% of what they seemingly want. People see this, then emulate said behavior.

Somehow, liberals would rather get 0% of what they want instead of 50% because of the missed 30% that the candidate doesn't support.

Is there a word for dragging the argument to near-unrelated topics? E.g, post about lemmy.ml having comments on whether Ukraine has a nazi government.

There is a series "The Alt Right Playbook" that covers a lot of bad faith and manipulative tactics, many of which are used online.

Whataboutism

Any logical falacy

Cherry picking is probably one of the most egregious

You can make a university-level essay on a subject, and people will identify one tiny irrelevant detail they disagree with and ignore the overall point

Someone started talking about my hair in the profile picture on a discussion on another site because they didn't agree with what I said.

When people do shit like this I just disengage. Life is too short to waste with bad faith arguments.

all of them, and are done by propaganda bots, like from russia, and israel. also trying to do the both sides argument, while ignoring that the other side is the one perpetrating it.

Moving the goalposts.

Butwhatabout.

Appeal to hypocrisy is big.

I have never seen an online discussion where gaslighting was used. People usually just learned the term and they think it's a synonym for lying.

It's bad food. I get into bad hungry defensive moods with bad food.

Appeal to Fallacy.

It might not be a fallacy.

A fallacy doesn't make an argument wrong.

There are degrees of fallacies.

Claiming a statement is wrong because there might be a fallacy is a thought-ending argument. There's more nuance and relatability in rhetoric. Refusing to engage because someone's using a fallacy is reasonable, but calling it by name isn't a magic spell that forces someone to throw in the towel.

Strawmanning because they won't or can't understand your argument, mistaking the map for the place usually because of equivocating on vaguely understood or multiple definitions, non-sequetor this is where someone just yaps for awhile based on the crap that falls out of their head based on the words they heard but didn't get the point and is barely tracking

Nice try, Elon

Using a wedge issue as a universal bludgeon to attack anyone that disagrees with them.

Not sure what technique that's called. Concern troll, possibly?

Also, vote manipulation. Basically they spin up a bunch of alts across different instances and boost/demote posts and comments in an attempt to steer discourse toward their agenda.

I see ad hominem very often as well as strawmanning. Specifically on lemmy people will say tankie/auth or irl they'll say woke/liberal and then use those insults to further strawman argumenents. Specifically multiple times I have said "hey I voted Kamala but her policies deeply concern me", and people responded with "Uhh how dare you not vote Kamala and openly declare you hate democracy, freedom, and trans people".

Flooding the zone (which now that I think about it is close enough to gish-galloping for there not to be much of a distinction), whataboutism, and moving the goalposts are all extremely common.

Whataboutism and moving the goalposts are the ones I see most often.

I think the most common thing I see online and offline is constantly adding more sources to the discussion to the point that the other person feels they can’t know anything. My grandmother does this with her nonsense and pseudo-intellectual books. Just because I haven’t read “why inner city black people have guns 3” doesn’t mean I can’t not be a racist.

Online arguements take ten times the energy to put in than to exit out, any well thought arguement could be shut down just by ignoring it, or making up reasons to avoid confronting it (whataboutism for example)

Motte and bailey.

• "The Kingdom of Foo has no inequality!"
• "Actually it has quite a bit..."
• "Well it's still moving in the right direction, and that's what really matters."

Online debate is a waste of time. You can somewhat short-circuit the bad-faith stuff by arguing values instead of facts or policy.

For example, if you say that the State has no right to remove trans kids from their parents, you've made a legal argument that's vulnerable to all the bad faith and you may even be technically wrong. However if you argue that you trust parents to decide what's best over the State, there is nothing to argue about. Bonus, you might actually get some real talk out of reactionaries.

Mort and Bailey, when they'll have a weak argument and a much stronger argument, they get you to attack the weak argument, and then they retreat to the stronger, more limited argument.

What do you call someone who is convinced you are something you aren't, based on only a couple words in a comment on a post, draws wild assumptions from that and no actual knowledge and demands you prove them wrong otherwise, they think, they win? Like I'm going to give you my resume to prove I'm not what you think I am? Nope

How about asking why you lose the argument instead of trying to label all this crap.

It's like you're watching your 12th "how to build a full stack application" video while they've already finished their 2nd project.

End of the day what they use to succeed is effort. We don't. Look at the answers here telling you it's pointless to engage. That's why they succeed online. Those people