Damn bro.Crap, I'm old and well...I spend too much time on the interwebz I guess.
Description
The sealioner feigns ignorance and politeness, so that if the target is provoked into making an angry response, the sealioner can then act as the aggrieved party.[7][8] Sealioning can be performed by a single person or by a group acting in concert.[9] The technique of sealioning has been compared to the Gish gallop and metaphorically described as a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[10]
An essay in the collection Perspectives on Harmful Speech Online, published by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, noted:
Rhetorically, sealioning fuses persistent questioning—often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points—with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate. It disguises itself as a sincere attempt to learn and communicate. Sealioning thus works both to exhaust a target's patience, attention, and communicative effort, and to portray the target as unreasonable. While the questions of the "sea lion" may seem innocent, they're intended maliciously and have harmful consequences.
