Have you heard of "tone policing"?

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Yes that sounds like an example. But it often happens that the provokation isn't noticed and the target gets the blame. It's very refreshing when a teacher actually notices who started a fight and deals with the situation properly.

I have seen the opposite, I seen this being used by those who don't like it when people set boundaries with them. Like I am not going to listen or discuss anything with you if you start to yell and scream at me and cuss at me like my mom does or else I will stop it right there and discussion is over between us. Oh no, people don't want to get abused so you are now going to accuse them of tone policing because they don't want you to abuse them and be berated by you.

If someone's always having others go off on them, they might need to examine why that is.

If it's always the same person going off on you it's fair to conclude it's a them issue, but if it's a common occurrence with lots of people the problem usually won't turn out to be other people. There's people on this very site who go out of their way to be as smug and condescending as possible at all times, when someone finally gets sick of it and bites their head off, they're not the victim—that's the natural result of their own antagonism.

Being able to remain calm, but also antagonistic doesn't make one less of an antagonist. It's literally just how trolls and high school bullies behave.

Haha, you're worked up. Now I'm walking away to avoid considering your self-advocacy and it's all your fault, let's just ignore my intentional antagonism.

If you're being an as*hole, pointing it out might hurt your feelings. Your hurt feelings are not a defence against the initial charge of being an as*hole though.

My mom was once talking to me how she loses friends and stuff and how old ones won't keep in touch with her and told me she sometimes wonder if something is wrong with her. I told her she can always go to a therpaist abut it if that is how she feels and wonders.

But honestly in the back of my mind I was thinking if she treats me the way she does when I have a different opinion than her, this could be why. As a child I would just wait till she was done screaming and I would stop responding to her to get the discussion to end ASAP or else it would have been disrespectful. Now as an adult I can finally stand up for myself without it being disrespectful.

For me to hear this has to be my fault or I must be doing something wrong feels like victim blaming and gaslighting like I am supposed to take this abuse and this is how people end up with letting people walk all over them and be a doormat because they are unable to stand up for themselves due to learned helplessness.

One time my mom was questioning if she was a good mother and if she did a good job raising me, like I am going to think of anything to say she could have done better. So I told her she did fine raising me. I wasn't going to rock the boat and dealing the screaming and cussing and swearing again if I say something she didn't like or didn't want to hear.

I know my youngest brother is like low contact with her because he feels she didn't do enough. My mom thinks he is just a private person but I wouldn't really be surprised if it's just him being low contact.

It seems fair to say her consistent social struggles are largely the result of how she behaves, no?

You're not an example of the sort of person on this site who behaves in the way I described in the quote. Some of those users are now former users because gradually the pattern was established and they either ragequit or got banned.

There seems to be a trend of various jargon terms being hijacked by people in overly broad, self-serving ways. Tone-policing is an example, so are gaslighting and setting boundaries. Sometimes one is legitimately engaging in self-advocacy (there's another one that can easily be used in this manner) when one identifies another's behaviour as tone policing or gaslighting and their own as setting boundaries, but that doesn't mean that someone might not also be choosing a very self-serving framing of the dispute and using those terms less than appropriately.

I agree with you broadly that this is a term that can be used in an overly self-serving way to shift blame and reframe someone else's healthy behaviour as actually unfair, I'm only stressing that so are the jargon terms you employed and that whoever is using those sorts of terms, one should be wary of how when you only have one side of the story it's easy for the framing to be controlled by deploying them.

Oh okay, good to know to your response was general than directed at me.

Other users experiences here have been the opposite about tone policing than what I have experienced. Like you can't insult a whole group off people and then expect anyone to not react negative to it.

I'm just saying if my mom's struggles with keeping friends is the result of how she behaves I experience from her, then that could be the experience others experience with her as well. I used to wonder how she even functions with this attitude she has and then she shares this with me and I realized "Oh, maybe it does affect her after all but not employment wise." At least it meant I wasn't too sensitive. Even my younger brother told her when he was in junior high that when she is screaming at him, all he hears is the yelling than the words because of how upset het gets from it. He set a boundary with her letting her know "hey, when you yell and scream at me, I can't process a word you are saying so if you need me to listen, you need to speak to me like how you would speak to your boss or to your patients and to people at work."

Even my own son is sensitive to yelling to so he ends up tone policing me as well when he thinks I'm yelling at him but I'm not. I don't take it personal because he is also on the spectrum so he is misreads cues and tone. Also it could be me with my own issue too where I have a hard time regulating my tone and volume which is also part of the spectrum too.

It's possible I am only seeing one side like if someone went and asked a question hypothetically and I saw a bunch of people attack the person for it and toss out random accusations, they would all look like bullies to me and the place would feel toxic and unsafe for me. Then those bullies go "oh we are just advocating and fighting for human rights," and I wonder "how is bullying someone for asking a question advocating for your rights?"

And this is why victims are seen as crazy and why people side with bullies and why people believe bullies more. It's hard to see who the victimizer is when you can't see the whole story.

Throw in my personal experience and then seeing people talk about tone policing and it feels like slap in the face for those who are very sensitive so it comes of as ableism for tone policing. People on the spectrum can be more sensitive to tone than an average person so you have to be calm when you talk to them or they will shut down and not process anything you say. Especially when you have social issues and people screaming at you when you mess up isn't helpful, especially when they won't tell you what you did wrong.

It's possible the person asking a question was posting in bad faith and I'm taking it too literal.

It's possible the place has been swarmed with trolls asking questions in bad faith so users have gotten jaded now of any new users who join and start posting questions.

But because I have never noticed it nor seen it, I assume people there like to bully new users and chase them off the board and then whine about being tone policed when called out by the new user.

I'm not sure asking for consideration of one's sensory needs is quite the same as what's being criticized as tone policing, even if in practice the two might appear identical at times.

The one is a request for considerate behaviour, the other is a bad faith rhetorical trick where one attacks the language or delivery of a message in order to avoid addressing the content. The former can be differentiated from the latter because the former will have an underlying cause or at least a consistent pattern but the latter will be done by the same people you've seen engaging coolly and smugly with worked up people many times before. The latter will also sometimes be used in a very nitpicky manner; if you didn't yell maybe you swore, if you didn't swear maybe you used an emotionally changed word, if it's not that maybe you used vernacular they don't understand, were dressed in an 'intimidating' manner, etc.

Another factor for genuine sensory issue vs. bad faith is the medium being used. If someone refuses to read an argument BECAUSE IT'S WRITTEN LIKE THIS!! ! their complaints about 'yelling' can be ignored, it's only a symbolic representation of yelling, the angry writing isn't actually louder.

It isn't tone policing to ask someone to be coherent or to not take their anger out on you. It also isn't tone policing to have to admit hey, you attempt to communicate with me in that manner it makes my brain dribble out of my ears and I cease to be able to accept further communication until I've collected all the goo.

It is tone policing when one seeks to win an argument via the rules of decorum, especially if it means dodging an otherwise coherently made argument.

On the other hand, yelling can be a spontaneous emotional response during a live conversation. Typing on the internet, it's much easier to appear calm, because nobody can see or hear you and (unless it's a live chat) you can wait to respond until you've had time to process what's been said to you. You have to deliberately press Caps Lock in order to "yell," suggesting to me the person wants you to recognize their angry tone, because why else would they choose to type it that way?

Indeed, they're symbolizing it because they want to communicate it, it just doesn't matter to the reader. Angry writing isn't more difficult to read. Being loud can overwhelm the senses. Typing in all caps can't.

Thank you for your response and thanks for the link to that refreshingly reasonable article.



What is the point of communicating it if the reader is meant to disregard it?

If somebody whispers at me in an angry tone, I might still respond to the anger, even if my senses aren't overwhelmed by the volume.

If you're deliberately communicating anger at people, don't be surprised if they respond with anger.

I don't recall ever suggesting that they can't respond with anger.

They just can't use your perceived anger as an excuse for refusing to engage with your argument because all-caps and lots of exclamation marks doesn't interfere with comprehension, whereas shouting might legitimately impair comprehension.

Speaking of CAPS locks, I have had that happen to me on accident because I somehow hit that button by mistake so I have to do it all over. It's so hard for me to read text when it's all in CAPS.

Same as when people don't use paragraphs.

Tone policing must be one of those terms being used in a way the word gas lighting is used or bullying and I have seen controlling men use the term "boundary" to describe their controlling behavior by calling them boundaries they set. Their boundaries are what women should wear, whom they can talk to and hang out with and how long they can be out for and how soon they shall respond to text, etc.

You find all this crazy stuff on social media like Twitter or Reddit.

Oh I have seen people call it tone policing when parents try to get their kids to talk in a normal voice than whiny. I have always said to that I really can't understand a word my kids are saying when they whine. Same as if they're yelling because they're upset, I really can't process a word they're saying because I get overwhelmed. So pardon me if I tone police here

People think parents pretend to not understand their kids as a way to get them to talk with a normal tone but I say not all of us are pretending here. It's like how smokers assume people pretend to cough or react to their second hand fumes when they puff because they refuse to believe some people really do react to the smell. It's not pretend.

I see where you're coming from, but I think all-caps might be a needless distraction from the point the person is trying to make.

To illustate:

I SEE WHERE YOU'RE COMING FROM, BUT I THINK ALL CAPS MIGHT BE A NEEDLESS DISTRACTION FROM THE POINT THE PERSON IS TRYING TO MAKE!! !! !! !! !! !!



(Anyway, all-caps doesn't bug me that much, but I'm always baffled by the people who Capitalize The First Letter of Every Word In Their Post. Not because it conveys any particular tone, I just don't get it. It's more work to type it that way.)