No Stupid Questions

Whataboutism

Here is a great piece someone put together a while ago which goes through many of the techniques bad actors use.

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

Moving the goalposts.

Butwhatabout.

Appeal to hypocrisy is big.

False dichotomy - Assuming that because someone doesn’t agree with one viewpoint, they must fully support the opposite. Framing the issue as if there are only two mutually exclusive positions, when in fact there may be many shades in between.
Strawmanning - Misrepresenting someone’s argument - usually by exaggerating, distorting, or taking it out of context - so it’s easier to attack or refute.
Ad hominem - Attacking the character, motives, or other traits of the person making the argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself.
Reductionism - The tendency to reduce every complex issue to a single cause - like blaming everything on capitalism, fascism, patriarchy, etc. - while ignoring other contributing factors.
Moving the goalposts - Changing the criteria of an argument or shifting its focus once the original point has been addressed or challenged - usually to avoid conceding.
Hasty generalizations - Treating entire groups as if they’re uniform, attributing a trait or behavior of some individuals to all members of that group.
Oversimplification - Ignoring the nuance and complexity inherent in most issues, reducing them to overly simple terms or black-and-white thinking.

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'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.

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

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.

"Thought-terminating clichés"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9

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.

Whataboutism

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.”

Nice try, Elon

Here's a handy guide to help.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

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.

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!"

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

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

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

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".

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)