Btw, internet users are orders-of-magnitude too quick to jump to the conclusion that they're dealing with "disinformation campaigns" and that sort of thing. As far as I can tell, most of the time they're just encountering other, equally disgruntled internet users who happen to have the opposing view of a topic and feel just as strongly about it. But even if it's a sinister campaigner masquerading as a disgruntled internet user, the solution is still what I described in the previous paragraph. That's the only thing that can work in the long run.
There's another, highly underrated and effective way to respond, though, and that is to simply ignore it and walk away. Responding to these things feeds them. If people would simply starve bad information/arguments of attention, they would fizzle out.
The firehose of bullshit makes responding to every bad argument untenable. It's a DDoS of online discussion. Making a counterargument is one strategy against toxic and harmful online content, but it's not the only one and not always an effective or appropriate one.
>That's the only thing that can work in the long run.
The only thing that works in the long run is removing and banning those who engage (knowingly or otherwise) in disinformation distribution.
> There's another, highly underrated and effective way to respond, though, and that is to simply ignore it and walk away. Responding to these things feeds them.
This is demonstrably false. As a particularly bad example, Rwanda learned this one the hard way. Russia wants Ukraine to lose popular support - if that happens many more innocent people will die than would otherwise. Ignoring the guy on the radio who tries to make others question you and wants to cause you harm will not prevent the machete from slicing you open.
>If people would simply starve bad information/arguments of attention, they would fizzle out.
They get even less attention when the material is removed and the user reasonable prevented from spreading more of it. This isn't high school debate club, it's a nation-state that wants to kill its neighbor's civilians.
People highlight instances of whataboutism to inform others and to point it out to moderators. Punishing them for doing that is clearly the objectively wrong thing to do.
What I'm saying is that accusations of "whataboutism" are the sort of canned argument we want to avoid on HN, as well as an internet trope (which we also want to avoid), a shallow dismissal (which the site guidelines ask to avoid) and a form of name-calling (ditto).
It's also a logical fallacy, since pointing out a contradiction via a comparable situation is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. No doubt people do sometimes bring up comparable situations in unhelpful, irrelevant ways, but if so, it needs to be explained how—not met with a lazy label like "whataboutism", which is a blanket that can smother a good argument just as well as a bad one.