I would be interested to hear the mod’s stated opinions on a certain behaviour. This is something I see frequently and this question is prompted by a very obvious example I just saw posted in the elections forum, but I’ll try to keep it hypothetical.
[ul]
[li]In a particular thread, Poster A makes a certain claim or statement. Multiple posters respond by showing or even proving beyond a doubt that the claim is false and does not stand up to reason. [/li]
[li]In a different thread at a later time, Poster A makes the exact same claim or statement. Once again multiple posters respond directly to Poster A and clearly demonstrate that the claim is false or not supported by the evidence. [/li]
[li]In yet another thread, Poster A once again makes the exact same claim or statement. Rinse and repeat.[/li][/ul]
In terms of this message board why is this behaviour allowed? Its not a question of ignorance, Poster A must know full well that his claim is false, that it has been proven to be false and his repeating the claim yet again won’t change the result. When typing out the words Poster A must know that he is not debating honestly, that he is typing something he knows has been corrected previously and that he knows will just antagonise other posters yet again.
In short, I believe this type of behaviour is intentional and is trolling. Am I missing something? And if it is trolling, should this behaviour be policed more stringently?
There’s an old saying, “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity”. It is possible for a person to simply be so dense that none of the refutations sink in, and being that dense is not against the rules.
There is also another aspect that I should have included in the OP. The scenario in which Poster A makes a statement, then multiple posters respond by asking for a cite to what is clearly a false claim. These requests are ignored.
The claim is made again, requests for a cite are made again, these requests are again ignored.
Rinse and repeat.
The direct request for a cite is not a refutation that needs to sink in.
I’m sure lots of folks here think that “Bush lied” is an established fact beyond dispute. But proving that someone lied is extremely difficult.
If it’s something along the lines of: “The unemployment rate in the US never got below 8% while Obama was president”, then that’s something that is much more easily judged true/false (but even then we have to make sure we are using the same measure of unemployment).
I think your point is well taken that mod action, in some cases, is warranted, but I’d like to see the moderators temper such action and make sure the poster is well over the line between my first and second examples, above.
ETA: I’m fairly certain I’ve seen mods step in during situation like you described in post #3.
One problem is the board rule against calling another poster a liar. Which makes it difficult to say something like “Poster A is saying things which he knows aren’t true.” Essentially a quirk in the board rules means that a person can post “Everything I write is true.” and nobody is allowed to dispute it. All you can do is repeatedly point out that the statements Poster A makes aren’t true without pointing out his pattern of making them.
Yes, very rarely I’ve intervened with an ‘asked and answered’ instruction to posters so that certain points are out-of-bounds as having been refuted. But it’s rare. There was that same sex marriage thread where someone kept bringing up ‘but can I marry my dishwasher?’ or something similar. It looked like it was crossing into trolling for response so I told him to stop it.
Other than something like that, where it seems obvious - to me, not the rest of you - that someone is doing it to be intentionally frustrating I’m leery of intervening in such a way.
Part of the problem is that some people don’t know how to generalize from specifics. They think that although an idea has been refuted in one context, it’s still valid in another, and needs to be refuted in every context imaginable. So they keep bringing up the idea repeatedly, not realizing that it’s already been refuted.
I’m pretty sure I’ve repeated a claim that I made years earlier that was refuted. It happens. (Other times I’ve been falsely accused of doing that - my second claim was modified to incorporate the new information.)
Not surprisingly my memory of the 2nd instance (I was right!) is clearer than the first (I was wrong!).
That said, I hope I haven’t needed to be corrected more than twice.
If truly intentional the behaviour outlined in the OP could be considered trolling but out of context it would be hard to make a blanket statement. It could be that there is more grey area in the subject than you personally feel there is. Or, as suggested earlier, it could just be stupidity.
Not gonna happen in this case. I’m pretty sure the OP is referring to a particular poster who has repeatedly asserted that Hillary Clinton is guilty of multiple felonies. When called on it, he disappears from the thread.
To me it depends on where and what subject. Take something like the various often-repeated-topic threads in Great Debates and you see stuff like that a lot and it annoys me a little. In say IMHO or MPSIMS there are a couple people who make the same statement over and over about whatever whenever the topic-that-inflames-their-heart comes up. In that case its no biggie to me and no skin off my nose. Try in in GQ and I will probably hit “report post” and let a mod take a look at it.
Well, there’s sort of a general rule about “good manners and common courtesy” which is often stretched but generally OK as long as specific rules about personal insults aren’t violated. There are also rules that say that obsessive and obstinate posters will (within reason) be tolerated in the interest of promoting discussion and debate.
Which raises IMHO a philosophical but eminently pragmatic question about the purpose of the rules, which that last point seems to answer. ISTM that what we (as a community) are trying to promote here is an environment for productive discussion based on established facts. Gratuitous personal insults, flaming, etc. run counter to that objective so they’re prohibited. And ISTM that many of the behaviors cited by the OP are just as clear as personal insults, but there is a reluctance to moderate them for fear of appearing to take sides on a contentious issue.
Yet as the OP asserts – and I agree – if someone fails to provide credible cites, ignores requests to do so, and even worse, repeatedly starts threads or hijacks existing threads with exactly the same pattern of behavior, it’s not really that hard to identify the lack of good-faith interest in legitimate debate. And it’s at least as great, if not greater, an obstacle to productive discussion as flaming and insults. In many cases – certainly not all – it’s really not that hard to distinguish between good-faith and bad-faith posting, between simple ignorance and willful ignorance and trolling. But I think here I may have a basic disagreement with TPTB. I have also expressed my opposition to the threads on “witnessing”, and I would note how many of them have been summarily closed as stupid and unproductive, and how many of those posters have – voluntarily or involuntarily – never been seen again.
Yes, but as has been mentioned, often times these types simply don’t return or refuse to acknowledge the evidence. I saw it happen in another thread too, perhaps the one about children dying in cars. There’s just nothing to do.
Indeed. While it may never be an issue that will have black and white rule breaking we all know this behaviour when we see it, and on a board that has the standing rule of “Don’t be a jerk” it seems to be a huge violation of that rule at least.
But why is there nothing that can be done? If this pattern of behaviour is reported to the mods is it something that will be addressed with warnings?
