this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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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.
It does not matter at all who the person asking the question is, how old they are, or whether they're asking in good faith or not. You answer the question for the sake of the audience who will read it. Answering the question is an opportunity to demonstrate understanding, inclusiveness, and compassion. Even if you suspect that the person asking is doing so in bad faith, there is no downside to responding as if they were doing so in good faith, whereas attacking them for asking the question is all downside.
If you're feeling frustrated and suspicious and you don't have the patience for it in the moment, then do not engage. You'll only do harm, to yourself, to them, and to anyone else who reads the discussion.
If it's clearly bad faith, you report and remove it. It doesn't actually benefit anyone to discuss with people who are using the question format to spread fascist conspiracy myths. Some posts are very blatant about it.
It is always beneficial because by doing so those observers who may be getting pulled into the fascist sphere see people that they normally get told demonize them trying to be reasonable and engaging in good faith were the side trying to "show them the light" is not. Sometimes thats all it takes to get people to reevaluate what they are engaging with and break the echochamber walls a bit. Remember you arent just discussing in isolation there are also the observers who you can aid as well. If those getting sucked into those spheres constantly get told people silence these ideas because progressives cant argue against them what do you think you do to the observers who see those posts getting removed without dialog? They start getting confirmation bias and pulled into those spheres even faster. Its the same reason certain religions send people door to door to spread the word of God, the point is to have those doing the outreach feel ostracized by the world so they become more ingrained into this group that "actually loves" them and is trying to act in "good faith" but is constantly shuned by the outside world. By just not engaging/answering questions or removing those posts you are doing exactly what they want you to do as it gives them ammo to feed their narrative of being persecuted.
I would say if you think you can tell someone is acting in bad faith. Call them out on that and explain clearly why it's bad faith. You can just ignore any response after that but I think it's extremely helpful to future readers if you can make them more aware of the tactics people making bad faith arguments use.
As op said. If you don't have the energy or desire to make a response it's more than ok to not engage of course. I would not want to wish arguing with people online against your will on my worst enemy.
Then answer as though they are asking in good faith, remain calm (which can be difficult, I acknowledge), and avoid dismissing their feelings or position. Remember that you're talking not just to them, but to everybody who reads the exchange in future, and some of those people will need those calm words to turn away from the rabbit hole.
This is the most important part. If they're arguing in bad faith, or they're just stubborn and stupid, you're not going to change their mind even with the kindest and most comprehensive response. But there are lots of people watching, and a lot of those people are trying to decide how they feel about the subject in question.
The best thing you can do is stand out as the voice of reason in an exchange. Your conversational partner might not be convinced, but onlookers will be.
And take breaks. You don't have to be everyone's savior. Do the help you can, when you can and just try to make the internet a little safer and happier than you left it.
The problem with this is that the trolls will have more time to sealion than you do, so even if you are confidently and eloquently rejecting their ideas, they will just keep flinging new bullshit until you run out of energy and they get the last word.
The last word rarely matters, what will leave an impression is the overall tone of the discussion. Once they start going in circles, you can wrap up your position too.
Most importantly, if you don't feel like you have the energy to engage in a discussion, just leave it, you don't owe the internet masses your energy.
Tbh, if someone is asking questions, that's (kind of) already a good sign - even if in bad faith, at least it gives space for expressing an opposing viewpoint instead of just closing off all the discussion with insults and attacks.
I'm definitely not a fan of insults etc. - at worst, I'd just report it. The issue is that some of these bad faith posts are made by rightwing political activists, those aren't in any way willing to change their point of view and are just binding resources that could be used elsewhere more productively. And if a community is targeted by those types, they can easily destroy it by posting so much that they dominate the feeds.
Yes but the purpose of that is to be banned and get content deleted so they can claim persecution as well. Its a tough thing to balance when getting over run by bots/trolls but you have to remember that the goal is not to change you its to feed a narrative to those they want to convert to their ideologies that they are persecuted and silenced without due consideration, they want to get banned so they can point back to it in a video later and be like see these progressives never engage and just hate, censor and cancel anything they dont agree with, they cant argue with is because they know we are right. Its all bullshit of course but by giving them those examples and banning instead of answering in a calm manner and moving on you reinforce their points to those getting indoctrinated.
Doesnt matter if its in bad faith or not, just answer the question with an honest answer. Even if its a bad faith question, the answer isnt. And plenty of other people will read it.
Because of the bullshit assymmetry principle, this just means people end up burned out from answering things, which is one of the goals of bad faith questions.
Doesnt matter if its in bad faith or not, just answer the question with an honest answer. Even if its a bad faith question, the answer isnt. And plenty of other people will read it.
copy/paste is your friend :)
From what Ive seen, and Im not accusing you, is that a lot of people dont want to give any answers. One of the worst things Ive seen being repeated like a mantra is "its not my job to educate you.". Like its this hand wave to the responsibility that we all have to make sure that misinformation cant run unchecked. I saw this on Reddit especially, and what happened was that all those people who had questions were abused and told to "educate yourself", as though treating people like this was the key to winning arguments. The result was shock and horror that Trump won in 2016 and then again later when Brexit happened.
So while it can be annoying, IMO, its import to always answer questions. Even if its just copy/pasting in an answer that youve already given before. This is turn helps to avoid echo chambers, because other people can correct me and you, should we have gotten the wrong information about something. It keeps us all honest. I mean, for shits and giggles Ive said some things that were straight up bullshit. But it fit the narrative, and people upvoted. No one pushed back at all. And thats pretty scary if you think about it.
I can copy and paste an answer if the question's sufficiently similar to one I've already answered, but if you're comitted to generating bad-faith questions, it's pretty easy to generate variants of questions that need a different variant of the answer.
I think an under discussed issue is the people answering questions in bad faith as well, not just obvious trolls but those playing longer cons.
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.
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.
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!
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.
"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.
Even if they're 30, it's better late than never for them to learn, right?
If they're going in without a desire to learn, you can't really reach them, at least not with forum comments. They'll probably need some work in person.
Some of these 30yos might even be paid trolls or bots.
Doesnt matter at all, half the of the purpose of the trolls is to get posts removed/banned as it gives them ammo to act like the persecuted group. Don't give them what they want answer the question calmly and keep moving so you dont allow their narratives to be the only ones visible to the susceptible people getting pulled into those hateful ideologies.