Complex's Guide to Starting (And Winning) a Twitter Beef

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Any beefer worth 140 character knows that the proper way to kick off a Twitter beef is with a subtweet. Subwteets are a way to generate interest from the public, the digital equivalent of letting everyone at school know that it's going down in the parking lot after sixth period. Is a beef still a beef if no one's watching? The answer, of course, is no. If Gawker doesn't write about it, it's like it never happened. Ideally, your subtweet is intentionally vague so that at any point in the beef you can claim that your opponent "misunderstood" the original tweet and took it out of context, but more on that later.

You have subtweeted. Your opponent has responded with a subtweet of their own. The warning shots have been fired across the bow of each other's Twitter handle. Now it is time to engage. The @ reply is the duelist glove slap of Twitter beefing. The @ reply will move a Twitter beef from mild to a full on "plague on both your feeds" level digital fighting.

In a Twitter beef, you are fighting a battle on two fronts. For interested bystanders to see your @ replies, they are going to have to dig into your feed. Put a period before that reply and you are taking your tweet public. When you're warming up and throwing your initial jabs, keep it @ reply only. Once you find yourself alone in the bathroom with the time to really draft a killer tweet, then take your insults public. Don't think that just because you've employed punctuation that you can't go back to @-ing. A great beefer will float back and forth between the two modes throughout the beef depending on what the situation warrants.

If you feel that you've truly been wronged and that the Twitter public will identify with your plight, it's time to create a hashtag. This is the Twitter equivalent of employing the nuclear option. Do not make this decision hastily or you may live to regret it. Your hashtag could be co-opted by the enemy, or worse, crash and burn with no hope of trending. The hashtag is a powerful weapon, and you always run the risk that the weapon will be turned against you.

Sure, pressing the cap locks button makes you look childish and angry, but it also let's the world know just how much you care. That being said, make sure you take a few deep breaths and consider all of your options before you go caps because once you go caps, you can never go back. If you plan on having an ounce of nuance left in your argument, hold off on the capital letters. However, if you know that you want the argument to be all about pure thoughtless emotion, big boys use big letters.

If it's still early enough in the Twitter beef, you can force a draw by claiming your opponent misunderstood your initial insult. Somehow, this is acceptable no matter how rude and direct the first insult may have been. Of course, if you take this cowardly way out, there is no winning the beef. Most of the time, it becomes apparent quickly that there will be no winners and backtracking is the best way for both beefers to save face. Sometimes the coward's way out just so happens to be the best way out.

If you pass the point where you can gracefully bow out of the beef, it is time to employ a scorched earth policy. Unleash those tweets at a rapid fire pace. As soon as your opponent responds to one tweet, they've got two more @ reply notifications. If you have the advantage of being as intelligent and funny as Patton Oswalt, then this approach is a no-brainer. Even if you are working with limited intellectual fire power, a barrage of tweets might still be a good idea. Winners of Twitter beefs are decided in the court of public opinion and often times, the squeaky wheel wins the beef.

If things start going south for you, you can call on your Twitter followers like a super hero calls on an animal friend or talking car. They call them followers for a reason; many times they will follow you into battle and take tweet fire for you while you craft your next comeback. Before you resort to calling on your devoted follwing, make sure you've got a large Twarmy. If they've got more followers than you, don't turn this into a war of attrition.

Digital capital does not translate to real life capital. You can always pull a Donald Trump, and rather than admitting that you're wrong, just tout your real life accomplishments. This will be looked at as a cop out by most of the Twitterati, who themselves live in the kind of one-bedroom apartments leased only to bloggers, vagrants, and graduate students. But, who cares what they think? You can always make like Scrooge McDuck and swim in your money to compensate for that fact that you were so very wrong.

If you don't have money or fame, then maybe you have looks. Let's just say that most hyperactive Internet presences aren't exactly as good looking as their avi might have you believe. The pen is mightier than the sword, sure, but a shirtless selfie demonstrating just how rocking your bod is can be the final word in pretty much any Internet argument. Whether you're talking about the Crimea or interest rates, the Internet is always willing to crown a hot person the victor, no matter how little they understand the subject matter being fought over.

Come on, you have to have something to brag about. If you truly have nothing going on in your life, why did you engage in this Twitter beef in the first place? Okay, maybe you got into this Twitter beef precisely because you don't have much going on. If that's the case, brag about something that the world has no way to objectively verify, like how much of a man you are or something. The world's most worthless people find all sorts of things to brag about and you can too.

Sometimes it isn't about follower quantity, but about follower quality. If you can get one b-list celebrity or minor league athlete to join your cause, you win. The entire motivation for most of our Twitter lives is the vain hope that someone somewhere with a blue check mark will notice our tweets and proclaim us a genius in front of the entire world. Even if a celeb as minor as the guy who played the Geico caveman or an obscure morning show host gives you their seal of approval, you have landed a death blow in any Twitter beef.

Jenny Johnson is actually very funny, but even if you aren't, you can take a page right out of her playbook. If you've got nothing intelligent to say, just quote your opponent's stupid statements with "Ok" or "Sure" in front of the quote. This is sort of the "I know you are but what am I?" of the Internet; it may be easy, but there's a reason that kids will be using "I know you are but what am I?" long after we're all dead and gone.

If it's too late to take back your original offending subtweet, you always have the option of staking out the moral high ground. This move is preachy and lame, but it can be effective. No matter how much vitriol has passed through your Twitter account through the course of the beef, it is never too late to claim a change of heart. You always have the option of deciding that the last tweet insult hurled at you was so childish, so vulgar, that it made you realize how ridiculous the whole thing was in the first place. Yes, it is required that you place a smiling emoji or #blessed at the end of your morally superior tweet to ensure maximum smugness.

Twitter is like Highlander. For the immortal Scotsman, the battle is not really over until a warrior has been decapitated. For the Twitter beefsman, the beef never truly ends until one participant in the beef is shamed into quitting Twitter. If you failed to land a death blow and convince your opponent to deactivate their account, there is always a danger of beefing again. You have to carefully monitor your @ replies and always be looking behind your digital back for a dagger of a subtweet. Remember this well: you subtweet the king, you best not miss.