The Gish Gallup and Brandolini’s Law

If you are a creator on the internet, or anyone running any kind of internet forum, you will find that your own proclivity towards civility and good manners will clash with the realities of the “Gish Gallup” and its cousin, Brandolini’s Law.

Brandolini’s Law?  The Gish Gallup?  What are those?

The Gish Gallop is a debate tactic of overwhelming an opponent with a rapid, massive volume of low-quality arguments, half-truths, and falsehoods to make refutation impossible in the given space and time. 

The term was first coined in 1994 by Eugenie Scott, and named after young-earth creationist Duane Gish, who often used this technique in debates. 

The Gish Gallup makes effective use of Brandolini's Law (aka the "bullshit asymmetry principle"), which states that the energy needed to debunk misinformation is significantly greater than the energy required to create it.

The Gish Gallup and Brandolini’s Law are the tools of the Internet Troll who, showing their own emotional and intellectual weakness, take great delight in vandalizing sites and forums while wasting the time and energy of others.  

Trolls crave attention, but are generally without the skills to get that attention by creating a sustained body of commendable work.

Trolls killed Twitter/X, which became a toxic dump, as had so many forums before it.  

When Threads started up, there was a conscience choice to try to make a different culture.  

How to do that?

Two rules were broadly adopted

1.  Do not engage with trolls. Block them without comment (i.e., extinguish the behavior).

2.  Applaud every personal success or sensible argument as much as you can (i.e., click and treat).

Unbelievably, that’s worked. Threads is simply a much better place than Twitter/X ever was.

Which brings us to Burns’ Refutation of Brandolini’s Law, which is a simple “ban and delete” instruction and response.  

Though a definitive cure, wide-spread adoption of a “ban and delete” response has been slow to be embraced because most people have spent a lifetime cultivating self-discipline, tolerance, and good manners, the very attributes  exploited by Internet Trolls.  

In addition, Trolls make clever use of human vanity by saying that any and every refusal to engage with specious, bad-faith, and unsupported claims is a sign of intellectual weakness from the other side.  In fact, it’s not; it’s simply a refusal to engage with a Troll on a troll’s terms, which are always bad-faith and never supported.

How can you tell the difference between those engaged in legitimate debate and those engaged in bad-faith trolling?

For a start, remember that Internet Trolls rely on asymmetry, which is a fancy way of saying they will make short, vague, and unverifiable Olympian statements without a linked source.  

Think RFK Jr. in the health care arena, and you get the idea.

Trolls have never produced any sustained work on the topic at hand because their goal is not to problem solve or illuminate, but to disrupt, vandalize, and obfuscate.

Bottom line:  If you are a creator on the internet, or anyone running any kind of internet forum, learn how to reign in your own civility and good manners, which are being used against us all.  

Or as we say in the world of working terriers; “vermin banged hard on the head will never trouble you again”.