The idea is that people are engaging with no interest in making society better. An example might be a person who advocates for policies that are almost certainly harmful to the communities he purports to care about because his rhetoric draws favor (i.e., social capital) from others of his well-to-do segment of the political spectrum. The chief idea is that someone is plainly not interested in addressing the problem they purport to care about, but that they want the benefits of virtue signaling or else the “politics as tribal sport” element or a fondness for malice and divisiveness.

To be really clear, I’m not making a veiled political statement—I can think of a dozen ways this could fit a bad faith person on either side of the spectrum.