I wonder to what degree concern trolling could be defeated (on a policy level) by outright banning 'concerns' in policy discussion and only allowing input to be expressed in terms of 'needs' (since that implicitly leaves open how to fulfill those needs, whereas 'concerns' attack a specific implementation and often imply another)
@joepie91 Hmm. Can't any concern be expressed as a need that the concerned individual simply won't accept is covered? Like, any concern about FediBlock being used to harass could be expressed as a need to not be harassed.
Maybe just record the concern *as* a need (if it's expressable as one) and then require that anyone wanting to discard a solution in favor of another show how the favored solution meets the accepted set of needs better?
reference to transphobia, ableism
@freakazoid "Can't any concern be expressed as a need that the concerned individual simply won't accept is covered?"
Yes and no. That's possible in a literal sense, but preventing that isn't really the goal - the goal is to make it *obvious to bystanders* that that is what someone is doing.
Right now, it's too easy for someone to express vague non-specific 'concerns' about an accommodation for marginalized folks, playing into the rhetoric of the broader political conversation in society, and this is accepted at face value, because "someone is concerned and we should care about that".
This doesn't really work when you need to express things in terms of 'needs'; that requires being very specific, as to what the need for *you, personally* is - you can't handwave away the rationale, you can't play into existing political rhetoric, and this means that the need can actually be assessed on its own merits by bystanders.
As an example: "we should not allow trans women in women's bathrooms because women's safety" is a "concern" that sounds credible on the face of it, to a lot of people.
But when that is reframed as "I, as a woman, need safety in the bathroom", it invites asking in exactly what way that safety is currently not there, and "because of trans people" sounds like an obviously incomplete answer. It makes incomplete reasoning and rhetoric stand out. It also opens up room to say "it seems that the safety problems actually come from men".
Ultimately it still allows *making* bad faith arguments, that will always be possible, the goal here is just to change the circumstances so that defeating them is quickly done and takes little effort, as opposed to the usual pattern of "spending an hour explaining things to bystanders every time a troll spends 10 seconds throwing rhetoric around", which is how concern trolling sabotages discussions.
"Maybe just record the concern *as* a need (if it's expressable as one) and then require that anyone wanting to discard a solution in favor of another show how the favored solution meets the accepted set of needs better?"
That runs the risk of situations like "abled folks deciding what accommodations disabled folks need" (which will generally be accepted by the crowd) and similar things, and so would do very little to protect marginalized folks, who are the primary target of concern trolling.
