Sealioning is such a bankrupt, speculative redditism to begin with. If someone's questioning isn't worth your time, then don't answer them: problem solved. We certainly don't need big daddy moderator trying to divine into the hearts & minds of questioners to decide whether they feign ignorance or are actually stupid.

Posing inane questions is as valid as anything in an online discussion. Socratic dialectic doesn't need sincere questions: it questions assumptions until we realize our ignorance. Asking uncomfortable questions is the point. I imagine Socrates & other philosophers who challenged conventionality by relentlessly questioning "obvious things" (especially when someone's not giving a real answer) would likely get banned for "sealioning".

With this case, I see Cowbee mischaracterizing the lemmy.world announcement to defederate from hexbear. lemmy.world admins saw irregularities in an instance announcement that raised doubts in the disposition of hexbear admins to seriously regulate brigading (another bankrupt redditism). In announcements usually reserved for boring admin business (policies, upgrades, federation), while hexbear admins wrote

Please read and respect the rules of the community instance in which you are posting/commenting.

they also included unnecessary statements promoting a common

• stance toward an opposed group ("try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear")
• ideology ("we nearly universally acknowledge that the West's role in the world", "It is in the Left's interest for these organizations to be demolished", "it is necessary for a better world")
• agenda ("try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda")

that could motivate users toward a concerted action (ie, brigading). Foreboding comments indicated risk of an ideological crusade from their users

that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.

Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.

Why did hexbear team need to write those statements there & what are they doing there? The lemmy.world team thought it was pretty clear:

The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to “dismantle western propaganda” and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

We've all seen how overbearing tankies get. Regardless of my thoughts on brigading, the lemmy.world admins clearly stated their position that hexbear poses a credible risk as a brigading hive with a questionable admin team they'd rather not deal with.

Cowbee mischaracterized it as a mere disagreement between ideologies when answering "why dot world blocked the commie instances"

Essentially, for having stances common to communists (opposing western hegemony is a big one they took issue with). Lemmy.world is run by your standard DNC-style liberals, they generally oppose Marxism and communism, and uphold the DNC as good. Some are also zionists.

This disregards the lemmy.world opposition to brigades going on crusades to "push their beliefs and ideology": that's an anti-brigading position and not a position defending a particular ideology, which (as "A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use") they don't claim (unlike hexbear).

I see null try to challenge Cowbee on this by quoting those ideological, agenda-setting statements (that had no good reason to be) in the hexbear announcement & user comments that promised a troublesome campaign to proselytize the fediverse, and I see Cowbee persistently evade by disregarding the elements indicating problematic conduct & not explaining why that nonsense was necessary. Cowbee would write loose interpretations that don't quote anything directly until one of their comments referred to a bolded line by confusingly combining words from 3 different lines (2 bolded lines & 1 unbolded line) from the lemmy.world announcement:

Why did they bold the line about the left wanting to dismantle the IMF, NATO, etc?

On careful interpretation, one could figure out which line they were referring to, but null didn't, and I admittedly thought Cowbee was referring to an unbolded line containing the words "IMF", "NATO", too at first: it was pointless confusion that should have just been a direct quote. Whether that line was bolded or not was tangential to the discussion. That didn't stop pointless fixation on the confusion (Cowbee had created in my opinion) from derailing the discussion until null conceded (cheap victory for Cowbee), and it didn't stop Cowbee from claiming null lied to their face, so they could continue evading the actual dispute.

That wasn't sealioning. That was just persistence with someone who would persistently try to evade.