Clickbait title: Not to judge, but why are you spending all your time complaining specifically about this?

I think we are all aware of the concept of lying by omission. You make a statement that is not technically wrong but is clearly disingenuous in the way it does not mention something quite important. Well, I think the internet has given us a new way to do it.

On the internet you tend to exist as an anonymous person which pops in and out of existence for others. If you are not currently livestreaming yourself from 5 angles, then people are not seeing all you’re doing. And if you stay between different accounts, it’s going to become increasingly hard to track what you actually spend your time with. This is generally good, I find it good that the internet gives us this asynchronous way to communicate.

But it does also mean that we tend to need to take each other at our word. Similar to writing letters, you may lie to your family at home at how well things are going. On the internet you can pretend to be an expert in something which you are not. And the only way to really expose you is on the grounds of the things you say.

Well if you are pretending to be a mathematician and claim that 1 + 1 = 3, then people can “call you out” or whatever. Lie exposed. Reddit loves doing this, for better and mostly worse.

But what about things which are more wishy-washy? What if the identity you pretend to have is ideological. Forums of bored children have of course found very early in the modern history of the internet that such false-flagging operations can be fun (if you’ve got no moral compass). Sadly also effective if done at scale.

What I want to talk about is a bit more subtle. It is the distribution of effort someone uses to post things online. Here’s a question, at which point of someone posting about mice being delicious, might they be a cat in disguise? Well, maybe 20 posts. But 20 posts over 20 accounts? I’ve got no idea, you’ve got no idea. They may just slip it into conversations.

Here’s an even worse version. What if they just engage in needling of statistics whenever someone brings up bird killings through house cats? Not explicitly disagreeing, just “concerned about the correct use of statistics”. Well on some level they must care because they wrote the comment. But here’s the crux: Writing a comment is really easy. Many people argue about benign things all the time online.

If our public square of opinion required everyone to go and buy a letter and a poststamp to send in their comment, then I think we could really question people why they put in this effort, because some motivation must’ve been driving them. But right now, they are “just asking questions”.

I think the most related concept to this is the idea of sealioning. “Innocently” asking questions to someone, but in a crowd of others (or sockpuppets) to the point the endless questioning becomes aggravating to the target and signals to outsiders that “something must be there”.

I should mention here that although I am describing this as a deliberate act, you can also lie to yourself with this. If you’re a self-professed “food-centrist” but spend all your time complaining about rice, maybe you should consider why you’re putting so much effort into it.