concern trolling

Concern trolling is a recent coinage of bad faith behavior in which someone claims to be part of a group and share the group’s goals, while actually belonging to an opposition group and working to undermine those goals by sharing “concerns” about said goals or methods to achieve them.

A surprisingly old example from WWII was Soldatensender Calais, a British radio station broadcasting in German pretending to be a Nazi radio station while carefully criticizing and undermining the Nazis:

The German soldiers and civilians listening to the station knew the Soldatensender was a British station masquerading as a German station. And the British who broadcast the station wanted the Germans to know it was the British. Their aim was not to deceive the listener, but to give ‘cover’ to German listeners. “Cover” so that if the Gestapo or commanding officer caught you listening—you could claim they thought it was a real Nazi station. Cover psychologically: it was easier to hear criticism of German leadership when it was presented as coming from “us” and about “our boys.” And cover to do what deep down many Germans wanted: surrender, defect, shirk and disobey the Nazis.