When to respond to the attackers? Are you giving free airtime to them?

If you are popular and have power, everything you do, share influences others. Anything you speak or write publicly, it's shared by thousands of people. So it's become very important to learn how to speak and write publicly.  You become the center of information, which gets transferred to everyone.

Whatever you speak is most likely to be attacked because different people have different opinions, and some may have vested interest to attack. More controversial the topic is more attackers you will have. As a human we dislike attacks, so we start defending the attacks.

Does responding to the attacks helps?
In most of the time, it doesn't. You are only giving free airtime to them, knowing that you will respond, they will attack with a greater intensity.

So what to do in such situation? If the critic is as popular as you, he/she can propagandize his opinion in a biased manner, even spreading rumors, non-factual, partial information that is logically correct to convince people that he/she is right.

The most important thing here is completely limiting the response. Responding needs to be very thoughtful and FACTUALLY correct, not opinion based so that no one can FALSIFY it. No need to be in a hurry to respond, collect all facts and then respond. Opinion based response only brings more controversies and gives more airtime to the attacker. Also no need to be in denial mode, if you said something factually incorrect, apologize for it, and give the correct information. But never indulge in opinion based arguments when you know that critic will not accept your opinion, no matter how much hard you try.







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