Thanks for providing an example, Banquet Bear - I agree that email does fit the bill in terms of sealioning. I’d guess that we had trouble finding examples because the tactic doesn’t see much use in most parts of the internet, but gamergate spawned all kinds of nastiness I wouldn’t see in other parts of the internet as well.
I think with this example we can put the idea that sealioning doesn’t exist to bed. It may not be particularly common to people who aren’t likely to be victims of it, but we shouldn’t mistake our own experience for everyone’s experience.
I’m not sure I understand when it would ever be appropriate. You are more than entitled to ask me why I said or believe something. I am thereby entitled to choose whether or not I want to discuss it with you. if I choose not to, you are not entitled to follow me around and constantly harass me for a response. I don’t owe you anything, take the hint and go away.
(in the above, “you” is meant in a general sense and not the poster to whom I am replying.)
I’d really like to nail this though. If you could provide a link documenting this sort of harassment, it would be nice.
Sorry you had to deal with that. Sorry that others had to deal with worse.
If you mention me by name in a public venue and I show up, I think I have the right to ask more than one question. That’s appropriate. I was basically claiming that the sole example of sea lioning that I discovered via my search engine involved wholly acceptable behavior. For appalling sea lioning, see Banquet Bear’s post. (I obviously retract my claim.) And as he notes, sea lioning is one of the milder forms of harassment involved in gamergate.
Are you asking Banquet Bear to provide a link to an email they received? Measure for Measure - I think it might be a better idea to google the first line of the email provided by Banquet Bear… that will lead you to this story:
Ok, then we’re in agreement. I say that basically I can repeat my question, ID my attacker as stonewalling, lacking evidence and question their integrity if they make a baseless attack on me. I can’t demand a response of course. Neither is it appropriate to start a multi-day one sided campaign, never mind an email blast.
(All of that remains a hypothetical of course and if the parties were pseudo-anonymous then the appropriate responses would be milder. And if the derogatory comment was directed at a group like gamers, anime fans or whomever the appropriate response would be milder still.)
Ideally, I wanted some journalistic description of actual sea lioning, something like you provided.
…one of the things you have to remember is that gamergate has been going for a year and I’m not really in the mood to dig through people’s twitter feeds to signal boost the voice of some very nasty people. One of the things that Randi Harper did (and one of the reasons I have chosen to back her on Patreon) is that she developed a “block bot” on twitter that does a very effective job of automatically blocking accounts that are liable to be gg supporters. So this has become a much smaller problem for many people on the net recently and also makes examples harder to find.
But I’ll post a few examples. (Warning, NSFW, and some not very nice stuff.) “a_man_in_black”, along with a lot of people came out in support of someone who definitely did something really stupid when they were younger. The Ralph Retort’s response was to ask “Do you support pedophiles, yes or no?”
Milo, a “journalist” who writes for Brietbart and who wrote the articles cited by “The Witchfinder” in the email above started this exchange recently: this time documented by Harper in a “storify” to make it easier to follow.
And to be clear: I really didn’t get sea-lioned. I got a few emails, I spammed them, I went on with life. I used it as an example of what the targets of GG have to put up with because I really didn’t want to put the spotlight on people who really don’t need it. They get hundreds of similarly themed messages like this every day (in the form of tweets/emails/messages). I’m not the target of these people. I’m a male, I’m not a “social justice warrior”, I only discuss gamergate in places like the Straight Dope where I am relatively anonymous and where I am protected by good moderation. I keep my head down. Some people don’t get that option.
Sea lioning seems like it shifts the attention to how you’re saying something terrible instead of what terrible thing you’re saying. A lot of posters here indulge in the same thing.
Could you elaborate a little? I’m confused by this description.
I think maybe you mean that sealioning derails the conversation from what it was originally intended by introducing outrageous statements/questions? I’m not sure though.
