It wastes our time, it riles us up, it torpedoes any substantive discussion of diary themes, it makes us look like nitwits to the entire outside world; it’s one of the biggest monkey wrenches that can be thrown into a discussion that might otherwise coalesce and begin sharing knowledge, begin organizing things. And don’t think for a moment that this is purely accidental, an “unintended consequence”. It’s a tactic and it keeps happening because it works.
When’s the last time you saw a serious social or political diary here where the comment thread stayed on topic and was not disrupted, sabotaged, diverted, etc., sometimes at great length, sometimes with the first comment out of the box! Did you come up with “never”?
And don’t be lulled by the fact that car diaries, repair diaries, nature and critter diaries tend to have focused harmonious comment sections. Talking about those things is important and bonds us, but it doesn’t actively push back at political threats. Look what happens to the diaries that DO.
You don’t have to hate someone to decide that you won’t play when they sea-lion or otherwise seem to be trying to provoke you. You needn’t be judging the person when you decline to play the game. You don’t have to believe they’re a troll or a sociopath. You certainly don’t have to tell them they are. Yes, the whole “perseverating while provoking“ thing is a tactic from the Bad Guys, but it can also be due to someone having a really shitty day and spoiling for a fight, someone who had a three martini lunch and isn’t quite equilibrated yet, someone who badly misunderstood you, or someone wanting attention while being completely clueless. It’s still timewasting and destructive, though, even in benign cases.
So I offer for your consideration this simple guide, greatly improved by suggestions and edits from siab!
How to recognize sea-lioning:
- Check that definition I’ve provided above. Sea-lioning is basically when someone hassles you relentlessly with “questions”, staying civil-ish in their words but being invasive, intrusive, and harassing in their actions. The cartoon depicts the basic technique.
- If someone shows up in a comment thread and is
- disingenuous — asking questions in apparent bad faith, as they reject every answer they are given as wrong or insufficient
- perseverating — won’t let the matter drop; this may persist to the point where it’s a form of stalking
- increasingly aggressive / provoking — insistent refusal to consider any counterpoints, while demanding that their points be accepted; this is an escalating provocation. Heed the message!
- tag-teaming — if one or more people “pile on”, especially if you see sidebars where they congratulate each other on their superiority to the person they’re working over, that’s a Sea-lion Tag Team. I’ve seen as many as five usernames engaged in tag-teaming someone.
- odds are good that you are seeing [or, poor soul, having] a “sea-lion experience”.
- sea-lioning is ABSOLUTELY a form of trolling. It’s not a good-faith interaction. Note, however, that it’s possible for regular participants to behave like sea-lions from time to time. If this persists, it’s a kindness to flag them when appropriate, since losing Mojo / gaining a TO may get their attention. [That’s not far fetched. We’ve seen people write diaries sincerely apologizing for being twits now and then. Bravo to all of them.]
If you come under attack:
- Watch the people who ask for clarification. Sometimes it’s legit. But bear in mind it may not be.
- Checking someone’s comment history is ALWAYS a good idea. It will show you if the user is new, or has a history of doing this. The pattern shows up very clearly in a comments list.
- The people who want real conversation usually won’t come in looking for a fight. They will often find something positive in whatever you’ve written that they’re commenting on, unless you’ve said something really boneheaded and they just want to put a marker down on that [a malady from which I suffer perhaps too frequently myself]. And their negative point will have context, it won’t merely be an accusation that you don’t know tiddly-boo, or similar. If they ask for a link, the well meaning ones will often specify what they’d like to see.
- If their comment history gives them away as a sea-lion, Give one good faith response [unless the person coming at you is just blatant, or they have been at you before and you are confident of their bad faith] and watch the reaction.
- they may very well ask something else. This can be perfectly reasonable. But if they shift the goalposts in order to find new things to pick at, or they mock or attack your response, or they change the subject and attack on a new front, etc., stop and block. State that you think there’s been a misunderstanding, and BAIL. You can tell someone you think you’re misunderstanding one another without aggression, and just refuse to engage further then. If they were genuine and simply got carried away, they may even apologize sooner or later.
- if you can stand to do it, you can also just disengage and ignore further attempts to distract you.
- bear in mind, you can’t flag someone you’ve been conversing with.
- Women here have seen just how many misogynists we have among us, and how quick they are to attack confident intelligent women who have and share their expertise. It would be helpful if more of the woke men here helped to shut that down, so women weren’t constantly dealing with it on their own.
- It’s usually easy to recognize because the attacks tend to be hostile and gloating. And there are certain users who go off like clockwork, alas.
- these are irretrievable, just bail. Label it if you like, but understand that’s not for the other party, it’s for the lurkers and later readers.
If you see someone under attack:
- check the thread. Read the apparent attacker’s comment history and the preceding comments in the current subthread. If it’s gone on awhile and it’s clear the attacker is perseverating, label the behavior, DROP A FLAG ON IT, and step away. You can call it perseverating, you don’t have to call it sealioning. Or you can just frankly say they’re ignoring context and substance, or not offering substantive replies. Perseverating is a perfectly good word, but it may not be strong enough for the situation.
- the person you support may be too riled up to “get” what’s being pulled on them, or they may just want to win too badly to walk away. Give them time. Just for the love of God, DROP A FLAG ON IT. REMEMBER: THEY CAN’T! And try not to misfire: don’t drop a flag on a target who has been provoked if you don’t drop a flag on the provocateur first. That’s just mean. Better still, just drop a flag on the provocateur, and give the target a chance to cool off.
- And whatever you do, DO NOT SAIL PAST SOMEONE UNDER ATTACK, DO NOTHING TO HELP THEM, AND STRIKE UP A CHUMMY CHAT WITH THEIR ATTACKER. That is the equivalent of giving the target an open-handed slap to the face. When in doubt, READ THE PRECEDING COMMENTS IN THE THREAD. When NOT in doubt, READ THE PRECEDING COMMENTS IN THE THREAD. Then act in accordance with what those comments tell you. If the attacker is a buddy of yours, I’m sorry, but you need to hold off from assisting bullies. Chat them up another time, and maybe ask them WTF they were trying to do to good old SoAndSo.
About flags [with much help from siab; I only knew about half of what’s here]:
- Not everyone here can “throw a flag”. If you can, the system knows it, and you will see a little flag icon down at the bottom of comments, in the same area as the Reply button. You click on that. If you want to know if others have flagged something, you click on the three dots at upper right of the comment, and it will tell you how many there are. A comment that only needs one more flag to be Hidden will have an orange line under it.
- You only get so many flags per day/up to five active flags, each of which resets for re-use after 24 hours. You can only flag any person once in a 24 hour period. You can’t flag someone you’ve been conversing with in the same diary, even if they suddenly surprise you with hostility out of nowhere. You also cannot flag anyone at all if you are a diary author and the comment is on your diary. You can flag other stuff elsewhere, but nothing on your own work. And if you’re too enthusiastic, you will be fussed at. This has not yet happened to me, as best I can recall; I try not to run out of flags on any given day.
- Two flags will hide a comment that has no recs. If it has recs, it takes 3n+1, where n is the number of recs. I have flagged a couple comments that were seriously hostile and offensive, even if they had many recs.
- get enough flags, or enough comments hidden, and a commenter can get a time out, or even banned if egregious enough. Bottom line, though, is that it is rare for anyone [who joins here in good faith] to be banned without first being flagged and having comments hidden. Someone has to be really blatant to achieve that, or they have to be an obvious spammer… different issue, not covered here.
About the gentle art of flagging [now with FREE expletives]:
- We here are often and rightly frustrated when Republicans on the Hill do ugly obvious destructive stupid shit and the Dems in response do… fuckity fuck-all. We go on about dry powder, and sternly worded letters, and how we want these people replaced, and so on and so forth.
- What do WE do, here, when someone HERE does ugly obvious destructive stupid shit that is AIMED AT SOMEONE HERE? A lot of the time we work very hard to come up with reasons to behave EXACTLY like those Dems we criticize. Look away, look away, do nothing, certainly nothing to help shut that shit down. Let the target fend for themselves, it’s entertaining.
- We really have to stop that. If we want to point and hiss at our politicians for lacking courage, we’d best start using our own stock of it.
- Explaining why a flag was dropped can forestall accusations of flag abuse [as long as you hew to the RotR]. But you don’t have to. Someone who had a flagged comment wanted to know who flagged them; I came in late, dropped a flag and said so, and of course they attacked ME then. If you expect bellicosity, don’t bother to explain, that was just dumb of me. Because if they’re already bullying someone, they are no longer entitled to much in the way of courtesy anyway.
- siab’s preference is to leave a comment and an explanation, especially if her flag is the first on a comment, unless she’s just adding to what’s there and there is already a good explanation. If nothing else, it can be a teaching moment for people who might wonder why it happened.
- And for the love of God, don’t go for magnanimity points and tell the attacker that you think their conduct is hideous but you’re not going to flag them because You Are A Good Person. If their conduct is hideous and you don’t want to flag them, just say their conduct is hideous and book it. Because when you do such a thing and announce it, you are valuing mercy to the abuser above mercy to the abused. Oh yes you are. Think about it.
- This is very similar to that earlier business of sailing past their abuse and chumming up to them right in front of the target. It’s an open handed slap to the person they’re abusing, right there in front of you in real time. You’re telling that person that they’re not even worthy of your notice, let alone your support. Just don’t.
Yeah, I know I said it was simple. And it actually really is; all this stuff I’ve outlined above is common sense for dealing with bullies, once someone has a bit of experience. We just rarely are taught it, if ever, especially the ethics-related stuff.
Siab has added some pointers that are so good I’m leaving them as she added them, with no to minimal editing, basically for flow.
Siab’s notes — a few additional minor notes on bullies and tactics:
- I find that the key to being able to take down a bully (most of the time), is to not post while you're angry - or at least not in the first fine flush of anger. This takes practice, and sometimes too much time just to let yourself cool down from trying to figure out how to throttle someone through the intertubes.
- It’s helpful if you can work (or at least fake it pretty well) from the assumption that the other person is acting in good faith, no matter how much their posts seem to deny it. Reply as much as you can to their words rather than what you suspect are their motives. Every once in a while, it actually turns out that their expectations about posting were at a tangent to practice on DK, and we get a reasonable member out of it. When that's not true, it's one of the most frustrating strategies you can select, because their intent is to raise the havoc level, and you resolutely keep bringing it back to normal.
- Sometimes it’s easy to tell a bully from someone who’s simply righteously indignant, sometimes not. (sometimes it’s both...)
- I think the most usual case is people trying to present opinions as facts, sometimes in the same paragraph as they announce them as opinions. The bullying may be completely unconscious, and the factualization of their own opinions simply a matter of never having had to question them fully. A request for a cite for anything that is not an opinion is always legitimate, as is a request for background on an opinion, though the second one has to be handled more carefully. If the opinion is rather a belief masquerading as an opinion, that can be the equivalent of setting a match to a fuse.
- Assume all comments containing argument by Authority, and to a lesser extent, all arguments that reference Logical Fallacies, are potentially bullying, since Logical Fallacies are generally ways of getting around the problem of not having clear arguments to support an opinion. /siab
I guarantee you this: if we got serious about shutting down bullies and sea-lions and stuff, oh my, we would see our discussions get serious traction and go a lot further than we can even imagine now. New people might come off Permanent Lurker Standby to join in, too, because honestly, just watching this ish is tiresome, it takes a special kind of person to volunteer for it. ;-)