Internet Conventions Aren't Rules of Logic

In defense of Just Asking Questions, Whataboutism, and the rest of them

We’ve all seen some version of the following conversation:

Person 1: “We should pressure corporations not to do business with Dave Chappelle and JK Rowling due to their transphobic speech.”

Person 2: “It’s important to be careful about using corporate America to suppress free speech. That is one of the lessons of the McCarthy era.”

Person 1: “How dare you compare members of a marginalized community to Joe McCarthy?”

If you presented Person 2’s argument in a formal logic class in college, it wouldn’t raise any hackles. It’s an argument from analogy. By drawing an analogy to a historical event (McCarthyism) where corporate America’s power was harnessed to enforce the suppression of a speech on the ground that it was harmful, Person 2 hopes to present in vivid form why there might be something wrong with that approach.

In contrast, Person 1’s response would be identified as fallacious: either a straw man, poisoning the well, or both. Rather than dealing with the comparison and pointing out reasons it might be invalid (for instance, one could point out that there was a great deal of state power behind the push to drive Communists out of corporate America, whereas the protests against Chappelle and Rowling are purely private), Person 1 decided instead to invoke a couple of familiar, unwritten rules: that any comparison between something labeled a Good Thing and something labeled a Bad Thing draws an offensive “false equivalence”, and that any criticism of representatives of a “marginalized community” is also offensive.

The Internet is full of these unwritten rules. For instance, asking questions to try and tease out the premises of arguments or to expose their weaknesses is Just Asking Questions, or “JAQing off”. Woe to the person who points out the log in someone else’s eye (a form of argument that, as you can see by this reference, dates back at least as far as the Bible)— that person is engaged in “whataboutism”. And, of course, there’s “bothsidesism”, where someone blames a particular cultural or political practice or result on the opposing party, and someone else points out that, actually, our side does that too.

The Internet is full of unwritten rules for argumentation. And Extremely Online people are very familiar with them and ready to deploy them, as if they are really rules that govern the validity of arguments. But, are they?

There are, of course, some actual “rules” of argumentation, in the sense of being principles that you can use to evaluate the strength of an argument. But they come from sources such as formal logic. For instance, if a conclusion doesn’t follow from its premise, it’s a non sequitur. An attack on a person rather than an argument is an ad hominem. A straw man occurs when a person invents a fake, easier to knock down argument and attributes it to the other side, rather than answering the argument actually made. There’s so many of these that a Wikipedia page is devoted to listing them.

Interestingly, though, in Internet discourse, few people actually care about these actual principles of argumentation. Indeed, it would only take a few seconds of searching to find someone making a straw man argument, or engaging in ad hominem attack. Instead, though, Internet argumentation has its own set of principles, developed not from logic but from the particular needs of forum moderators from the early days of the Internet.

Here’s the basic history. One of the earliest popular uses of publicly networked computers (indeed, this even pre-dates the public World Wide Web and extends back to the late 1980’s and the era of public dial-up bulletin board systems) was discussion forums. A system operator would install a specialized piece of software on a server, and users could log in and post their thoughts, organized by topic. And many of the familiar terms we now use on the Internet come from that period, such as “troll” and “spam”.

The thing is, forums needed a set of discourse rules to function. Some of them were pretty straightforward- stuff like “no profanity”. But others involved issues that specifically arose from the online discussion forum format. For instance, it was common that when someone attacked George H.W. Bush over some issue, someone else would point out that Bill Clinton did something that was equivalent. That person might or might not be right about Clinton, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t post it, but it didn’t belong in a discussion thread about Bush. It was whataboutism, the notion that instead of defending one person, a partisan might try to derail the discussion by attacking a different person on the other side. “What about Clinton and what he did?”

Or, you’d get someone who would never really state their own opinion, even though they had one, instead just annoying the other users with questions. There’d be a discussion of the Kennedy assassination, and most users would be stating their own views. “I think Oswald acted alone, and here’s why”. “I think it was a conspiracy, and here’s why.” And then you’d have one person whose actual view was something crazy, say, that Lyndon Johnson had Kennedy murdered. But she knows that if she says that, she’ll be called nuts. So instead she would adopt a Socratic method and, over and over again, ask questions designed to make it look like Johnson had Kennedy murdered. And when she was called on it, she’d say she was just asking questions.

There were a number of these rules that developed in discussion groups, and they migrated over to Internet discussion forums. And in that element, they were fine— they kept discussions on topic. The problem is that they aren’t actually rules of logic; they are just convenient guideposts for running an Internet forum. But at some point, the justification disappeared and the unwritten rules remained.

And the problem is that the unwritten rules are bats. Just asking questions, for instance, is one of the best ways to test an argument. There’s a reason, for instance, that every appellate court in the country asks lawyers hypothetical questions about the arguments being made. Yes, it can be annoying that someone is asking you questions without stating their position, but that doesn’t make the tactic into an improper form of argument. At most, it means you can call them on it by asking “what’s your position, anyway?”.

Similarly, in the real world, the application of principles consistently to your own side as well as the other side is how you find out if they are really principles. For instance, during the recount in 2000, the Bush campaign simultaneously took the position that all sorts of ballots with slight defects on them, like a missing signature or a “chad” that was not punched all the way through, should not count. Meanwhile, they also advocated that ballots sent in from overseas by servicemembers should count even if they weren’t postmarked and it was possible they were sent in after Election Day in an attempt to help Bush. That argument is pure “whataboutism”. It’s also a completely valid attack on the Bush campaign— you can either decide to be really liberal about counting votes or really strict, but you can’t adopt two different standards based on whether you think the votes will favor your side!

People on the Internet hate analogies. Every analogy draws “false equivalence”. Woe to the person who points out that Joe McCarthy or Josef Stalin used a particular tactic- “how dare you compare X to Stalin?”. Obviously, there is such a thing as a false analogy. An argument from analogy can be attacked when its premises are false, or where there are material differences between the two situations. But analogies aren’t “equivalences”; people argue from analogies because they think the situations are comparable in a relevant aspect, not equivalent.

Or take “concern trolling”. Concern trolling occurs when someone points out that a maximalist position can lead to backlash, or may be impractical. Maximalists, of course, hate concern trolling. But in the real world, you had best listen to the concern trolls. One imagines, say the head of United Artists signing off on Heaven’s Gate, which turned into one of the biggest box office bombs in history, and some subordinate pointing out that the public isn’t very interested in an hours long epic about two warring factions in the Old West. “Oh thank you, concern troll.”

That’s right, we’ve actually invented a term for being the person in the room who says “you know this isn’t actually a great idea”, and stigmatized it. What could possibly go wrong with that philosophy?

The point is, not only are none of these Internet memes actual rules of logic, but in fact, they run counter to logic and even common sense in many instances. We actually should ask questions, care about consistent application of our principles, and be wary of impracticality and backlash. But because people have forgotten that these were just a bunch of niche rules to govern unruly Internet discussion forums, they have lost the plot.