I think there's a few concepts at play here: descriptive vs normative claims, the 'question under discussion' and the cooperative principle of communication.
The cooperative principle of communication describes the rules or 'Maxims' which govern good-faith attempts at communicating. Among those are the maxim of manner, or clarity, and the maxim of relation, or relevance. Good-faith utterances should be clear and relevant to the question under discussion.
The problem here is, most casual speech is indirect and allusive, and tweets are a bizarre form of utterance directed at nobody in particular but at anyone who wants to reply to them. I think the exchanges you describe happen because the question under discussion isn't clear, and more specifically, it's not clear whether it's a question about a descriptive claim (i.e. a statement about the way the world is or is not), or a normative claim (a statement about the way the world should or should not be, or how someone should or should not act).
If Alice states "this headline is incorrect", that's superficially a descriptive claim, but we might infer that she's actually making a normative claim: headlines should accurately reflect the content of their articles.
Bob's reply is also a descriptive claim: "headlines and articles are written by different people". Bob has assumed the question under discussion is, 'why are newspaper headlines inaccurate'. Is Bob violating the maxim of relation here, or has Alice been insufficiently clear?
The real-world example you share from Twitter, I struggled to analyse a bit, because the article is behind a paywall and the full context of the tweets are behind a login-wall. But from what I can tell, I actually don't think this is a great example of the issue you highlight with your Alice and Bob example.
The question under discussion in Piper's article is a normative claim: whether or not the hantavirus patients _should_ have been quarantined. LaMesa assumes that Piper is advocating that the WHO should have this power, and then is making a counter-claim. You could argue he's setting up a strawman here and then arguing against that, I can't tell because I don't know what Piper actually said or what exactly LaMesa was responding to, but he is broadly acknowledging the question under discussion posed by Piper.
LaMesa's making some other leaps of logic here — the fact the WHO can't currently dictate quarantine policies and allowing them to do so would require changing international treaties is an appeal to the status quo, which is a subset of reasoning from an is (descriptive) to an ought (normative). It's also a big leap of logic to say that the WHO being able to quarantine people would validate "the worst conspiracy theories of Covid skeptics".
I think the problem is that your initial statements are underspecified. You might say, for example, "Hauntavirus carriers should not have been flown back to their home countries." But the use of the passive voice (or the generic reference to "humanity") leaves your statement underspecified. Who shouldn't have allowed these hauntavirus carriers to fly home? Until you fill that in, you haven't made a coherent statement. So people trying to engage with your statement make an assumption about who you meant (WHO), and then rebut that. Maybe you meant someone else - the Dutch government (as it was a dutch cruise ship) or the cruise ship company, the government of the Canary Islands (where the passengers disembarked), the airlines themselves or the governments of the countries where the airlines are based, or the the governments of the carriers respective home countries. There are many possibilities of who you might think ought to have done something different, each of which might lead to different replies, and you didn't specify which you meant. You left your statement ambiguous. If you specify who you think ought to have done something differently, I expect you will get better responses.
In some of these cases it probably is a fallacy like you say, though in many cases I think it *is* just trying to be blame-allocation-correction. Criticisms of headlines often read like "the journalist was so stupid that they thought this headline was accurate", and so it's fair to shift the blame, and maybe also fair to say "no-one was actually stupid/evil here, it's just Molochian incentives". I feel like *I* often say this latter thing, and the point is just "here's some help identifying the nature of the problem, so that you can have a better chance of solving it". But yeah in the Hantavirus case idk
I think there's a few concepts at play here: descriptive vs normative claims, the 'question under discussion' and the cooperative principle of communication.
The cooperative principle of communication describes the rules or 'Maxims' which govern good-faith attempts at communicating. Among those are the maxim of manner, or clarity, and the maxim of relation, or relevance. Good-faith utterances should be clear and relevant to the question under discussion.
The problem here is, most casual speech is indirect and allusive, and tweets are a bizarre form of utterance directed at nobody in particular but at anyone who wants to reply to them. I think the exchanges you describe happen because the question under discussion isn't clear, and more specifically, it's not clear whether it's a question about a descriptive claim (i.e. a statement about the way the world is or is not), or a normative claim (a statement about the way the world should or should not be, or how someone should or should not act).
If Alice states "this headline is incorrect", that's superficially a descriptive claim, but we might infer that she's actually making a normative claim: headlines should accurately reflect the content of their articles.
Bob's reply is also a descriptive claim: "headlines and articles are written by different people". Bob has assumed the question under discussion is, 'why are newspaper headlines inaccurate'. Is Bob violating the maxim of relation here, or has Alice been insufficiently clear?
The real-world example you share from Twitter, I struggled to analyse a bit, because the article is behind a paywall and the full context of the tweets are behind a login-wall. But from what I can tell, I actually don't think this is a great example of the issue you highlight with your Alice and Bob example.
The question under discussion in Piper's article is a normative claim: whether or not the hantavirus patients _should_ have been quarantined. LaMesa assumes that Piper is advocating that the WHO should have this power, and then is making a counter-claim. You could argue he's setting up a strawman here and then arguing against that, I can't tell because I don't know what Piper actually said or what exactly LaMesa was responding to, but he is broadly acknowledging the question under discussion posed by Piper.
LaMesa's making some other leaps of logic here — the fact the WHO can't currently dictate quarantine policies and allowing them to do so would require changing international treaties is an appeal to the status quo, which is a subset of reasoning from an is (descriptive) to an ought (normative). It's also a big leap of logic to say that the WHO being able to quarantine people would validate "the worst conspiracy theories of Covid skeptics".
I think the problem is that your initial statements are underspecified. You might say, for example, "Hauntavirus carriers should not have been flown back to their home countries." But the use of the passive voice (or the generic reference to "humanity") leaves your statement underspecified. Who shouldn't have allowed these hauntavirus carriers to fly home? Until you fill that in, you haven't made a coherent statement. So people trying to engage with your statement make an assumption about who you meant (WHO), and then rebut that. Maybe you meant someone else - the Dutch government (as it was a dutch cruise ship) or the cruise ship company, the government of the Canary Islands (where the passengers disembarked), the airlines themselves or the governments of the countries where the airlines are based, or the the governments of the carriers respective home countries. There are many possibilities of who you might think ought to have done something different, each of which might lead to different replies, and you didn't specify which you meant. You left your statement ambiguous. If you specify who you think ought to have done something differently, I expect you will get better responses.
In some of these cases it probably is a fallacy like you say, though in many cases I think it *is* just trying to be blame-allocation-correction. Criticisms of headlines often read like "the journalist was so stupid that they thought this headline was accurate", and so it's fair to shift the blame, and maybe also fair to say "no-one was actually stupid/evil here, it's just Molochian incentives". I feel like *I* often say this latter thing, and the point is just "here's some help identifying the nature of the problem, so that you can have a better chance of solving it". But yeah in the Hantavirus case idk
thank you for writing this
also very relevant with political discourse