I was bullied in Highschool....and managed to overcome physical attack via indifference - to the point that the bully actually gave up.

Of course that was decades before the Internet became the playground of these men-with-no-balls ...

TBH, it doesn't even phase me.  Not even the slightest pang of anxiety. I take the drama and redirect it towards something else.  

That wasn't always the case.  Even after the defamatory Kotaku hit-piece article about me and my "sexual harassing" ways I still genuinely believed that rising above the fray was the proper way.  Absorb the hate, avoid it, ignore it and they'll go away.  Except, of course, they didn't. 

By ignoring the defamation and "being above it" what happened was the people who pretend to care about society and believe they have a duty to destroy "the evil people" (now referred to as "social justice warriors")simply made that narrative the accepted narrative. 

I remember when "#gamergate" happened back in 2013. I wrote a post "Define yourself or be defined".  Back then, many thought their issue was obvious enough that it couldn't get twisted. That is:  #Gamergate is a hashtag for people who want to prevent gaming coverage to be based on the fringe politics and personal, sometimes intimate relationships of the journalists in order to improve ethics in game journalism".  

If your opponents are political motivated game journalists who genuinely believe they have a moral duty to change the world, they will stop at nothing to define you.  So now, #gamergate is known as the hashtag used by alt-right, misgynists who want to keep women and minority out gaming and probably rape things or something.  Or at least, that's what I keep reading. 

So no, you can't rely on their integrity.  Define yourself before you get defined. That's where the 5 rules come in:

Consider this from yesterday:

Nathan Grayson, the "journalist" best known for banging one of his subjects, works at Kotaku, the disgraced media outlet that effectively ruined my reputation with their defamatory "sexual harassment" article.  Despite having been proven wrong, they actually self-reference to continue their narrative that we're bad. 

Not everyone at Kotaku is a "bad guy".  But when your labor pool are people willing to work for basically nothing in San Francisco you're not going to get the best and brightest.

But the irony of a Kotaku reporter using Kotaku's now discredited reporting as self-supporting evidence of us being a "bad company" was too rich to ignore.

Rule #1: You attack someone's livelihood, don't be surprised if they respond in kind.  Will Stephen talk to Nathan? I don't know.  Unlike most of the ilk over there, he's actually an accomplished journalist.  I suspect, at the very least, he winced.

Here's a Rule #5: Don't set rules for others you don't follow yourself.  Don't spew out hate into the universe expecting it to not return back.

This person, an editor as Mashable, decided to accuse us of "dog whistling" because we hired Adam Baldwin for voice acting (man, these guys are really going to go nuts when they find out all the other people we got to VO). 

Here's an example of rule #3.  Just plain ridicule of a wannabe journalist.

Here's a rule #1.  Hayden here, made a tweet that said "Company with problematic views hires actor with problematic views".  Not sure what views he thinks Stardock has that are problematic.  Given the lack of diversity that exists on 2nd Street in San Fran (it's white male central) one can only guess what they think is "problematic". 

When I asked what was problematic about Stardock this led to him alleging that we have gone through 6 PR firms in the last 6 years.  Pretty sure that's not the case but I do know that we have switched up PR firms after the last few game cycles because the results were poor.  Perhaps the PR companies did do their job but the SJWs they deal with are so corrupt they just refused to cover things their readers might want to know about.

This is probably more of an answer than you were looking for. 

The points being:

1. Don't instigate Internet drama.

2. If someone does instigate drama directed at you, DO NOT try to absorb it, use one of the 5 rules to redirect it.

Did you... did you create an account specifically for this thread? Anyway, there's always Peter Thiel's method of crushing "journalists" with lawsuits.

Kids typing nonsense behind the screen is a trend these days lol, I tend to ignore. Social Media is a disease.

And you can pin that on the lack of father figures because of the destruction of marriage and the nuclear family. And you can pin the destruction of the nuclear family on... and so on. Go back long enough and you realize that everything that is happening today is connected.

Problem is, these days we can't rationally discuss these problems - so we can recognize the causes and come up with some valid solutions - without being immediately branded with some stupid label.

And so the trap is set.

I can honestly ignore twats on social media because I avoid social media sites like the plague.  My only online social connections are vhere at the Stardock forums, primarily Wincustomize, and that's all I need/care about.  I don't even buy newspapers anymore, haven't done for 30+ years.  I just didn't need or appreciate the scandals, much less the damned advertising on every page somewhere.

Yup, I'm pretty happy in my isolation, as some people call it.

There is one problem with that: remember Martin Niemöller's "First they came for..." poem?

There comes a point where you can no longer bury your head in the sand and you MUST choose a side, while you still can.

I'm not talking about social media tiffs. I am talking about what is behind all these 'politically correct' and 'virtue signaling' movements - and if you think those are limited to 'social media tiffs' rather than something infecting the very core of Western society, then you should start paying a bit more attention to what is going on, Starkers.

It's everywhere.

It doesn't get any plainer than that. The west touts their freedoms but ignore the abuses of those freedoms. Perhaps that's why the west is labeled as somewhat decadent. Social media does nothing more than allow that abuse in the form of hate and fear mongering. Anonymity allows people to bash, denigrate and otherwise demean those they do not agree with for whatever reason. Not getting into specifics but it all boils down to "If you ain't like me you're no damn good." My opinion. 

Agreed, you are right about this. we can't label it anymore.