The 7 Bloodiest Social Media Battles

THE ISSUE:
When Director Kevin Smith boarded a Southwest Airlines Oakland-to-Burbank, Calif. flight on Saturday, February 13, 2010, he was in for a treat... or more like, punished for treats.

With only one seat available on the earlier standby flight (instead of the two he usually opts for due to his size), Kevin was asked by the airline to leave because of the cramped space; even though they're the ones that seated him.

Kevin Smith, popular filmmaker followed on Twitter by over 1.6 million people, had a plan.

THE FIGHT:
Smith was so infuriated for being thrown out of the flight because of his weight that he took to his giant Twitter account (he's got over 1.6 million followers) to rant and rage over the whole debacle.

After millions of RTs (Retweets, for the uninitiated... it means that people repost what you posted), Kevin's complaints were so floaded around the interwebs and airwaves so prominently that Southwest responded a few hours later, contacted the director and apologized.

They did still, however, continue to stick with their "Customer of Size" policies for fire safety purposes.

The moral of this story is that if you're connected and powerful enough in social media, you have more power and reach than most local news anchors.

THE ISSUE:
The users of 4Chan launched an attack on Gawker Media’s servers in mid 2010 for writing about 4Chan users coordinating the harassment of an 11 year old girl (that whole Jesse Slaughter debacle... the girl WAS kind of a brat).

4Chan users wanted to silence them and make them remove all the articles mentioning 4Chan.

Unfortunately for 4Chan users, things didn’t go as planned; the site slowed but did not crash. Gawker users continued to write on message boards, smack talking about 4Chaners. 4Chaners then launched another attack on Adrian Chen, who has been documenting 4Chaners helping the 11 year old into safety, and 4Chan went ahead and posted all his personal information on the popular /b/ messaging board and spammed his email account to no ends... and this was the beginning.

THE BATTLE:
In response, Gawker writes: "For the rest of the summer, we're encouraging everyone to write about 4chan without hesitation. As always, the best response to dumb young guys trying to intimidate their enemies online is to inundate them with targets and refuse to be intimidated. And if any of you sad 4chaners have a problem with that, you know how to reach me."

However, a day later, 4Chaners celebrated their success as Gawker’s load time slowed down to 9.28 seconds with an Average Speed per KB of 28.98 seconds, costing Gawker tens of thousands of pageviews... which really just goes to show, you probably shouldn't mess with 4chan, as no matter how powerful your site is, they have more time and resources than you would ever even CARE to compile.