Out there on the Interwebs, a concern troll is someone on the other side, politically, who gives you supposedly well-meaning advice on how your side can do better politically.
There’s nothing in that definition that implies ‘troll’ in the standard sense.
So, can one call someone else a concern troll in GD?
ETA: To answer the obvious question, “why would you want to?” is that it’s a well-established, well-defined term with no apparent equivalent. Over the past few years, threads by Republicans telling Dems what they ought to be doing (usually involving some sort of imitation of Republicans) have been a chronic feature in GD. I must admit, I’d like to call a spade a spade.
That’s interesting, I’ve never heard the term used for politics before. I’d only ever seen it in personal matters - i.e., someone who gives you unrequested rude or bad advice about your health or relationships under the cover of trying to help you. I can see how the concept extends into what you describe, though.
I would prefer you not. Trying to parse out the differences between “concern troll” and “regular troll” and other forms of “______ troll” and decide which are forbidden insults and which are simply objective political discussions strikes me as way more trouble than it would be worth, and would be inviting all sorts of abuse.
And I’m not really sure that “concern trolling”, as the OP defines it, is entirely divorced from the more well-known definition of “trolling”. Isn’t the term basically saying “Poster A is dispensing apparently well-meaning advice to the Demopublicans about how to win the election, but I know good and well that Poster A is an ardent Republicrat, and I suspect he is simply telling the Demopublicans things that will lead them astray and/or turn them into carbon copies of the Republicrats”? This concept of “concern trolling” has in common with your basic “Internet trolling” the idea that the other poster is not really acting in good faith. We would prefer that you take such concerns to the Pit rather than air them in Great Debates.
Now all that of course applies to other posters on this board; it’s not that we want to shut out all criticisms of points of view, theories, beliefs, political parties, and so on–even harsh criticisms may be appropriate. We just want to put limits on the poster-on-poster interactions to keep the whole board from turning into some ghastly landscape of burning sulfur and scorched rock and the shades of the damned shrieking at each other. Saying “I think that when Republicrat strategist Joe Pundit last night opined that the Demopublicans best bet for the upcoming election is to come out in favor of big tax increases on the middle class, he was just concern trolling”–that’s a different situation from saying that about someone else you’re actually having a face-to-face (or at least keyboard-to-keyboard) conversation with.
I wasn’t at all familiar with the term “concern troll,” and when I entered it in Wiki I got redirected to “Troll.” That alone doesn’t bode well for its use here.
