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The simple answer to these situations is usually that it's not the same people complaining in both instances. I see similar things in places with anonymous posting where people assume everyone was in agreement on x, then later they hear something different and try to frame it like a flip-flop or a gotcha. People are never all in agreement.

To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother posting about how they're glad minors can use social media freely, but once restrictions are in place they will quickly complain (because they prefer the old way).



>it's not the same people complaining in both instances

I just learned a brand-new term for this: It's called the "Goomba Fallacy"[1]

[1]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy


> The term references an Internet meme depicting the fallacy using Goombas, which was first posted to Twitter by @supersylvie_ on January 29, 2024.

The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this.

Maybe “population fallacy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy ?


Funny enough, searching "goomba fallacy" in wikipedia's search yields [association fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy) and it appears to be more accurate. (Also, what I assume to be semantic search hitting that article from that search is amusing and more than a little telling.)

The population fallacy is when one infers information about an individual from the group, which wasn't done here as there is no specific individual in question. The population fallacy is seeing that some demographic likes to do a thing more than other demographics and thinking therefore any given subject in that demographic likes to do that thing.


That's brilliant. I suppose the same issue exists in polling and politics in general. You can't please all of the people all of the time.


The renaming tactic used is much more interesting and useful than the fallacy


Someone the two groups never meet in one thread. Somehow they are all afraid to voice their points when the other group is speaking.

It is something worth pointing out.




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