The definition of "extraneous" is "irrelevant or unrelated to the subject being dealt with". The user was talking about Amazon. How can the fact that they work

The definition of "extraneous" is "irrelevant or unrelated to the subject being dealt with". The user was talking about Amazon. How can the fact that they work at Amazon be irrelevant or unrelated? > Bringing those back into a different context to get the upper hand in an argument is a breach of civility. Is it, though? I'm just thinking of applying that same argument to other situations in life and I don't know if it works. Is it a "breach of civility" for employers to look at your past work experience before hiring you? Is it a "breach of civility" for voters to consider the past political record of candidates when evaluating them for office? I would argue that bringing in historical information from a user's past discussions is not "bringing those back into a different context", it is enhancing the current context. Mentioning that a user works at a company, while in a discussion about that company, is providing additional useful context to that discussion. > I wouldn't call that comment astroturfing, either. We can agree to disagree then, I suppose. The definition of astroturfing is "the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants." Again, that fits, to a tee, what the user was doing. He attempted to mask the sponsor of the message by lying about not working for Amazon. I'll agree with you that I shouldn't have called him out in a comment. I put it in a comment because I wanted to give him a chance to edit his comment rather than his whole comment being hidden/removed (since his comment did provide good info), but perhaps should have just flagged it or emailed you instead. This interaction doesn't give me much faith that anything would be done about it, though.