The term sealioning has emerged for a situation that might be familiar to anyone who has ever been dragged into an argument with a stranger on social media or in the comment section of a news article. It refers to a specific type of trolling in which a commenter enters a discussion, generally uninvited, indicating that they just want to learn more about the topic and asking questions. In reality, they are eroding the goodwill of their rhetorical opponent by never accepting any answer and demanding proof that they don’t accept, until the person they are targeting lashes out, appearing unreasonable or emotional. Thus, the sealion has won.
If you’ve been sealioned in real life or online, you’ll feel like every argument is cyclical. You make a point, only for the sea lion to storm in asking for proof of what you said. Your expertise and knowledge are denied. It’s your job to go out of your way to convince them, even though they’re the one who questioned you in the first place.
— Jessica Lindsay, Metro UK, 5 July 2018
There is no suitable answer that the sealion will accept; therefore the wisest course of action is “don’t feed the troll.”
When I read the description of this term, it reminded me of many internet discussions, obviously, but it also triggered a memory I had when I was on my mission. A young stranger, someone I mistakenly thought was an investigator, started asking me questions about God. “Wow,” I thought, “our afternoon might not be a total waste of time after all!” Boy, was I wrong. No matter what answer I gave to his questions (as a missionary, thinking I was the expert), he demanded scriptural proof. I quickly discovered that in reality, he wasn’t at all interested in my views or what we were there to teach. All he wanted by framing it as a question was to set himself up as the expert by correcting me and requiring proof. He turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness. To quote Tracy Jordan, the mento had become the manatee!
But of course, that got me thinking. Wasn’t I equally guilty of engaging in so-called “discussions” that were really just one-sided teaching opportunities, setting up our viewpoint as the correct one? We may not have taken a combative approach, like the JWs typically did, but we still weren’t really interested in learning from them, just in them learning from us.
Sealioning has several features in practice:
- The person appears to be sincere and curious
- The person uses polite language
- The person frames the questioning as part of an honest intellectual debate
- The person may feign ignorance of the subject matter
Some examples that will help you determine if you have been trapped by a sealion:
- Repeatedly asking for proof of basic concepts
- Asking questions that are not intended to clarify something
- Denying the other person’s expertise and knowledge
- Asking the other person to justify their opinions until they are satisfied
That’s a pretty good description of my interaction with that young Jehovah’s Witness. It’s less on point for how we engaged as missionaries, mostly because we didn’t really ask theological questions or demand others prove their perspectives. We were more of an improvisational approach: “Yes, and…”
I was thinking too that I’ve been in gospel doctrine classes where the teacher used something like the sealioning approach, although less confrontationally because Mormons are inveterately polite. When a teacher asks a question that sounds open-ended, but in reality, they are looking for only one specific answer, something they have in mind that you would perhaps never think of on your own, this feels like a form of sealioning. You’re being corralled into their playpen, not actually engaging in a discussion. One teacher asked the young men, “What’s your most prized possession in life, something you are born with?” As you can imagine, there are about 50 different good answers to this vaguely worded question! But no, the “correct” answer, according to him (someone from a pedigreed Mormon family, natch) was “Your family name.” OK, buddy. If you say so.
I’ve become a little concerned that some of the sealioning I’m seeing online, and there is a LOT of it, is really just AI-driven Russian bots. Who’s to say?
Oh, and speaking of weird encounters with JWs, regular readers will know that my mother died this year. Last week, for the first time this year, I finally cleaned out my voice mails. Since I don’t answer calls from unknown numbers, all the people whose numbers I knew had already been taken care of. But there was a voice message from someone I don’t know at all, whose name I’ve never heard in my life, who said he was reaching out to offer comfort to me in this time. At the end of the message, he said I could call him back or go to jw.org to find out more (!). This was a proselytizing call from a total stranger on my personal cell phone, seemingly referring to a personal life event. How on earth did the JWs find out that my mom died? How did they get my personal cell phone number? Is Zuckerberg selling my contact info to religious missionaries? What is going on here?
- Have you encountered this tactic online?
- Have you encountered it in a church setting?
- Do you think there is a fundamental difference in how Mormons proselytize and JWs or SDAs do? Do you think some ways are preferable? Why?
- Did you ever feel you were being manipulative or one-sided in your missionary teaching?
- Have you had a strange experience with proselytizing from JWs or others that is similar to the one I shared at the end of the post or heard of this happening?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
Almost by definition, proselyting is manipulative. It’s not much different from how most salespeople learn manipulative conversational tactics. There is no salesperson of the month award for being totally truthful or explaining both the pros and cons of this car or that new big screen TV. It’s about results. Proselyting and sales are both primarily about results, not ethics or honesty. The whole LDS emphasis on proselyting contributes to a variety of institutional ethical failures.
So here’s a question or two: Does serving an LDS mission and the attendant focus on proselyting results lead to a “the ends justify the means” mentality among Mormons? And does the LDS organizational obsession with statistics play into the same mentality? What would it be like to belong to a church that isn’t obsessed with converting the Gentiles or improving meeting attendance and instead cared mostly about improving the spiritual lives of those who attend Sunday worship services every week?
Hawkgrrl, I wouldn’t find contact from a JW comforting. They don’t exactly believe in life after death except for a few thousand people mentioned in Revelation.
Dave B, I agree we are too focused on numbers. I would prefer we don’t focus on numbers at all and instead focus on the needs of people one at a time
Most sealioning I see is on Reddit, which, being a social media site that is primarily made of strangers interacting might be ideally suited. I don’t see it happening at church mostly because church doesn’t have a forum for a lengthy back and forth between people. (Also, I play the piano for primary.) Mormons certainly love our leading questions though. Also, from a very young age, we are doing a great job of conditioning kids that Jesus is the answer to any question at church. I mean, it’s clearly the right answer about 80% of the time, but I get a kick out of the kids answering any difficult question with “Jesus!” even when it doesn’t make any sense at all.
I used to live across the street from a Kingdom Hall and the JWs would stop by once or twice per year. They were never anything but polite. They would always come to invite us to their Easter services and were never pushy at all. As a missionary myself, we certainly knew and employed tactics that we knew were likely to get people to let us come in and teach a discussion. I served in a place where culturally the people didn’t like to tell you to get lost, so we would, at times, use that to our advantage to teach a few extra discussions to people who weren’t interested. My mission was probably less crazy numbers driven than most, but still we had quotas to meet (or at least get close to) to keep from getting too much attention. Thankfully even my teenage self was wise enough to draw the line at manipulating people into baptism.
As for the JW voice mail, they may have been spamming many numbers with the same message. 5+% of people at any time are going to be looking for “comfort in this time”. You might just be part of the 5%. (Henry B Eyring said years ago: “when you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble, and you will be right more than half the time”, so he’d put that closer to 50%.)
The term is new to me and I’m still trying to understand how specific the metaphor is meant to be. It sounds like it’s referring to repeatedly dragging prey back underwater after they think they have escaped. I think I’ve seen such a thing online. I hope I haven’t done it myself. I do sometimes respond to people who say really ignorant and misinformed things by asking where they got their information. Is that sealioning, or do I have to challenge them repeatedly? Though I do sometimes engage with strangers online, I’m not generally interested in perpetuating said discussions ad nauseum. I definitely sometimes walk away and let them have the last word when I see it is becoming unproductive. Does that make me a victim of sealioning? I don’t know.
The Sunday School situation you describe feels different to me. To use another water-based metaphor, some teachers clearly go “fishing” for a specific answer at times. It’s annoying and bad pedagogy, but it usually doesn’t feel to me like someone is trying to “win” an argument. I suppose it is a version of having a specific interpretation in mind and getting your audience to accept it as the correct one. Maybe it’s still trying to win in a way, but I’ve never seen a teacher show the level of persistence I saw in my interactions with JWs as a missionary. I would definitely categorize their typical tactic as sealioning. Any time someone asked me “what’s the name of God?”, my mental reaction was “is there a way to opt out of the 15 minute discussion we’re about to have about the ‘correct’ name of God?”
I was a missionary 1963 – 1965 and memorized the “discussions” from beginning to end. That group of discussions were a major example of sealioning: asking questions which had a presanctioned answer which would lead the “investigator” on to the next preordained answer, leading to an expected conclusion. I always felt uncomfortable using that manipulative technique but followed my leader, attempting to make it work. It very seldom did.
Would Jesus have been a Republican or Democrat? What seems like the setup to a joke is being asked in all seriousness. Two weeks into a controversial administration, I’m hearing people ask how a good Christian could possibly vote…
How a Christian pastor could possibly support… An Episcopal bishop and a sitting president both state that God is on their side while remaining flatly opposed to one another. Near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said that both North and South read the same bible, pray to the same God, invoke God’s aid against the other, but the prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither had been answered fully.
Once we see an enemy, we imagine God is on our side, because we only have an enemy if we are certain we are right. An enemy is the wrong one. God is never wrong, so God is on our side, because we are right. Blaise Pascal said that people never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Truth is, the real enemy is not the other tribe— the real enemy is the certainty that makes the other tribe an enemy. We’re all co-opting God to our side, our tribe. It’s natural for anyone who reveres Jesus, or the authority of his name, to imagine he is in their camp. But what does the record show?
Jesus made his own followers crazy, over and over…every time they became certain of their positions, thought they had him figured out, domesticated, he rocked them back on their heels. For anyone with an agenda, he was frustrating, infuriating, unexpected, outrageous, an equal opportunity offender of anyone who was seeing the enemies of their certainty. Jesus refused to be co-opted into any camp. Whatever political beliefs he had are not preserved in the gospels, meaning they were irrelevant to his message. They never created enemies for him because his primary identity was not in camp or tribe, but in oneness with his Father. If we can only see truth in our own tribe, we’ll see enemies everywhere, but we won’t see Jesus. He’s in the space between camps, where the real enemy is not another tribe, but the certainty that makes enemies of everyone else.
I think there is a difference between sealioning and asking leading questions. Yes, both have only one correct answer, but in leading questions there is no effort to prove each offered answer dead wrong. With leading questions the response to a “wrong” answer is “yes, and…” while with sealioning the response is more, “NO! Because…..”. Sealioning is out to prove you wrong, while leading questions just want you to get to *their* answer instead of yours. There is a humiliate the other person goal in sealioning that leading questions don’t have.
As to have I ever experienced it, just look at the progressive or feminist blogs. Like here. They are usually male, and always holier than thou. I could name the ones here, but everyone but them knows who they are.
This reminds of the Mormon stories episode on street epistemology. I found that entire discussion fascinating and loved listening to the tape recorded discussions. Like Anna said, simply asking open ended questions in order to help the other side own their responses. Or perhaps a bit closer to home, this reminds me of the work done by the black menaces on BYU campus.
So what’s the difference between that and sealioning? Intent?
All social media is ragebait now. Anything to get comments, good or bad, to improve their SEO position. Anonymity but advert revenue. Yuck.
That JW voicemail has me reeling. My viewpoint is that it’s wildly inappropriate to reach out to a complete stranger in a moment of vulnerability like that, but I hope their viewpoint is simply that they thought it might be helpful. Bizarre.
This past Sunday in gospel doctrine, the teacher was discussing the section about the lost 116 pages, and in predictable fashion, used both Martin and Joseph as cautionary tales. He asked the question, how does Satan deceive us?
The very first answer pitted scholarly work, which the commenter stated was Martins dichotomous temptation. It immediately positioned academia as “evil”, supposing that scholarly efforts undermine faith, and that divine revelation is always superior. I bit my tongue, but couldn’t quiet my own thoughts, you mean divine revelation is superior accept when it’s not, accept when its completely wrong. For a simple example, if we accepted the Bible at face value as literal truth, we would all still believe today that the earth is flat. Oops, that worldview got upended by scholarship.
Then, another commenter brought up the Netflix series “Under the banner of Heaven”, which I know nothing about, other than the title, so I didn’t necessarily have anything useful to say about it. He intimated that it is also a tool of the devil to destroy their faith and pull them away from the Church. He took particular issue with how the series depicts Brigham Young. Without watching the show, I don’t know if they completely botched BY’s character, but my suspicion is, among the many artistic liberties used to tell a story, they likely told some truths that members just don’t want to know.
30 plus years ago back in my TBM days, I had a pair of JW women knock on my door. One was very kind, but the other was rather aggressive and unpleasant. I found myself getting a little wound up (spirit of contention!) and ended our interaction. A few days later, the nice one knocked on my door by herself to apologize for her partner’s behavior. I was really impressed by that action. I invited her in, we had a lovely discussion, and she even allowed me to give her an article of faith card. What started as a negative experience ended on a positive note. That said, since then I’ve avoided any discussion with them simply because I know neither will convince the other and I have no desire to engage. I also decline literature because I will only put it in the recycle bin and don’t want to waste their materials/resources.
While we are on the subject of JWs, I think we need to come to the realization that the DMV is the one who holds the keys of the kingdom, and we ought to expend our efforts bringing people to the knowledge of the holy driving records and the ineffable mysteries of government efficiency. Remember, let go, let gov.
Don’t forget the original 2014 webcomic that gave the term it’s meaning; it’s not just about making a bad-faith argument uninvited, but also of being a smarmy, fake-civil twat about it the entire time.
https://wondermark.com/c/1062/
I survived three weeks in Jacksonville, Florida doing summer sales for home security systems. It was a true cult. They top execs taught us common sales tactics. But it was the mid-range execs who taught us pure unadulterated high-pressure manipulation. Everything a person would say to ward you if you would interpret as a “concern” that you would proceed to resolve by asking them questions. You would learn ways to physically position your body so that you could slither inside their door. You would learn tactics to control the conversation through questions. You would blow of their questions, such as how much does this cost, by asking more questions. We had logos on our shirts from other larger companies because we apparently used their products. We were instructed to point to those logos and say that we were from ADT or GE. Misdemeanor misrepresentation is what they were telling us to do. If someone said “I have to talk to my spouse” you would ask if they could call their spouse right then and there or you would say, “do you really need your spouse’s permission.” Anything to get them to sign as soon as possible for the installer to come later that day. If we weren’t doing well in one area, the execs would say, “that’s because we found out that it is not a good area, but this new area is a gold mine.”
If you weren’t making sales it was because you weren’t good enough and needed to improve yourself. It couldn’t possibly be because their business model was crap and their products were overpriced and unable to compete with local competition that used traditional advertising. I saw sales reps dropping right and left after a couple of weeks. This made me decide to bail. No sales for me at all. After I got back I ran into another sales rep who had stayed longer than me but left early. She said that the team in Jacksonville was dissolved and relocated for lack of performance. I then ran into one of the team execs and noted that the team had been dissolved. He lied to me straight up, “no it wasn’t, we did well.” Total liar. Total manipulator. Summer sales was nothing more than a con-game where slick-talking execs would dupe the unsuspecting into doing grunt work on promises of making “$20K+” in a summer. Most would barely make a sale or two. But the execs barely paid low-sellers, and reaped the bulk of the profits from their sale. Top execs were in it just for a few years to milk profits before they would sell the business to other dupes who then had to clean up messes. Pump and dump in Utah Valley. Vivint was the biggest of these scam machines. Sued many times for deceptive business practices. I’m happy that the downtown arena in Salt Lake City has had its name restored to a real company Delta and not a bunch of fraudsters.
It comes down to how you show up in a conversation. Are you there to be heard or to listen/learn? Jordan Klepper had an interesting snippet recently on the Daily Show. He goes around to the Trump rallys or other very MAGA gatherings to interview people. His whole schtick is to televise some of the more dumb things they say and believe. There was one particular day at one of these rallys that he interacted with a particularly energetic MAGA person. And obviously, at the rally, with cameras, people get pretty defensive and performative. The interaction obviously didn’t change any minds, but by happenstance later that day or the next, Jordan got stuck in the airport waiting for the same delayed flight with this same guy. And after they both came to an agreement that there were no secret cameras anywhere or some gotcha surprise, the two were able to talk for 3 hours and just learn about each other and where they were came from. Jordan shared that the conversation was enlightening and that it gave him hope that even though he didn’t agree with this guy on everything, that this guy did want things to be better in the same way that Jordan wanted things to be better.
I look at apologists like Jacob Hansen and pretty much anyone Ward Radio would bring on and it is just bad-faith arguments. There is no seeking to learn. It is only seeking those things that buttress their positions and their rightness in them. It’s awful to listen to. But, then you have Mormon Stories and sometimes I get frustrated with them because they are attacking it solely from a pure fact perspective and they seem to forget that the very flawed church helps a lot of people show up as their best selves. I grew up in the church and the church was a huge part of the my life and an important one when I was young. So saying things like, “how can you be apart of an organization that _____________” also comes off the same way as apologists. When I was a missionary, I asked lots of leading questions to people to lead them to baptism. I doing that. I really missed out on connecting with these people first.
when does Socratic dialogue cross the line and become Sea Lioning? IMO, like this:
Cuddling with a toddler to read their favorite animal book while pointing out animals to ask “what’s that?” because the child lights up with joy at the chance to answer and do their part of the reading.
The other side of that line would be:
an angry parent who shames their teen child by pointing to an empty cereal bowl on the floor and demanding to know “what’s that?” It isn’t a genuine invitation to participate in discourse, just a manipulative demand that the teen admit they are in the wrong.