Yes I know, each of these terms has a well defined meaning. But that's not how they're used in practice. They are used in games of strategic equivocation.
A better read is this post, which frames it as a conflict between people who communicate to share information versus people who are seeking emotional harmony and who interpret disagreement as one-upmanship. One person offers the gift of information, the other interprets it as a slight.
The problem here is that the label is based on the assumed intent of the asker as perceived by the person they’re asking. In my situation, I was asking about a social justice topic that I probably know more about than the average person but not nearly as much as the people I was discussing it with. Unfortunately, said people were in a minority group currently under attack in this country and were tired of people arguing with them in bad faith. In their eyes, my questions were indistinguishable from those they had seen before when being harassed.
It’s a tough situation. I want to understand the issue and I’m happy to listen to someone explain it to me, but those people are consistently so tired of explaining themselves and trying to avoid harassment that it all seems like the same thing.
I don’t really know what the solution is. I don’t really like “Don’t participate in the discussion until you’ve read a thousand pages of history and theory about this subject,” but... I don’t know. I’m increasingly questioning my qualification to even discuss these issues because I simply don’t have the life experience to understand them.
I think I've seen more examples of it in action as well. Maybe. Seems hard to know for sure. For example, is "Please provide evidence for your claim" a good-faith way to start a debate, or is it just a cheap way to keep a person quiet until he or she can come up with some data?
Don't like the proofs provided? (cause they show you are wrong) Then you must be sealioning, even if it's the first thing you write.
Edit: A mature adult does not need a label to deal with annoying and obnoxious people on the internet. There are lots of ways to deal with them. (the least of which is to simply ignore them...)
Twitter is where I'm more used to seeing sealioning, where someone will make a comment about something and a bunch of strangers (sometimes coordinated elsewhere) show up demanding a debate about it.
