I saw the link to the study you previously posted and skimmed through it. It doesn't address anything outside of a very narrow scope of review though. It didn't extrapolate their findings to influence of outside actors, or to individual demographics from what I recall (I may be wrong, like I said, I only skimmed it).

A 7% share of a population is still a major chunk of any given population. And one of the issues I can see is that the voice of that cohort is being amplified and augmented by outside forces. So it may be 7% of the population in the States, but because these arguments are happening online there may be a dis-proportionally larger percentage of people in the cohort due to people from other countries piling onto the argument.

Still 7% is a much larger cohort than it may appear at face value. I've seen studies that say that once 10% of a group believes something that it will basically spread throughout the group, before that 10% it would be considered a fringe idea. There's a summary of it here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110725190044.htm

So if the 7% figure is correct it would seem that we would be very close to the ideas espoused by that group to become generally accepted in short order.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

"Outside forces", eh? Care to elaborate? I mean, we all know that by "outside forces" you mean US and European mainstream media. They are who amplify voices of "social justice" believers and ignore any challengine ideas. But why? Can you answer that question, or you will keep silence as in case of my previous comment?

It isn't the size of the population that matters, it's the power and influence of the people promoting the agenda, and that's not something you, or GOG, is going to comfortably ignore.

no, it is the realisation that if you do not want to drag your organisation into a political discussion, then you do not tweet pictures that can be deemed political by any group. it do not matter who or what group, you do not need to bow down to anyone if you do not put yourself into that situation to start with.

It wasn't one problem. It was three. Three strikes, you're out. I'd say that GOG gave Linko plenty of opportunity to "figure out" what's appropriate to post on a corporate account. He didn't figure it out.

To be fair, there isn't much that isn't going to offend *some* group on twitter, because being offended is all the rage these days.

There's a lot to unpack here because you're just arguing for the sake of arguing and that is fairly obvious. GoG wasn't making a political statement because they didn't make one. That's all the evidence you should require. They never came out and said they support or don't support anything. They just apologized. Apologies aren't political statements. So that's not an opinion, that's just common sense.

My comment about "real gamers" was simply alluding to the fact that "real gamers" aren't a real thing. That again isn't just an opinion, it's common sense. Anyone who plays games is a gamer, and those people can have a wide variety of opinions... go figure.

They aren't simply catering to an outrage mob. They are protecting their business image. That one I will concede is simply an opinion, but it's also kind of common sense.

The fact that you buying games here doesn't give you the right to dictate how GoG runs their business isn't a strawman argument. That again is common sense. They may on a large scale, should a large portion of users stop using the service over this issue, but at an individual level, the rules of capitalism don't really play into it. Trying to extrapolate large scale economic systems to low level incidents doesn't really work.

That person behaved like an idiot on social media and was removed for it. It's a good thing. Now stop the endless bickering and be done with it.

By outside forces I simply mean anyone outside the measured cohort. Not the media specifically. Anyone who is outside the measured cohort and outside the sample group participating in debate or argument about said issue. So really.... I mean us. It's a US study and we are both outside the sample group.

So far as your previous question, I didn't answer it cause I honestly thought it was rhetorical. It took what I said out of context in a way that I viewed to be deliberate and thus I viewed it as sarcastic and not actually expecting a response.

To answer your question, no I don't think people should be fired for minor problems like using a hashtag incorrectly. That happens, and it would be a problem if there was no other recourse beyond firing someone for such an offense. That being said, if it is something that happens frequently than yeah I think there's cause for firing someone. As I said early in the thread, I used to work for a marketing firm that provided social media management to large businesses and had someone I worked with did what Linko did with a client account I guarantee you they would have been fired. And the firm would have likely lost the client. That is, sadly, the nature of social media management. A large part of managing twitter outrage has become offering a staff sacrifice to the mob. That's just the way it's become.

^This. And considering that tweet had to be about such political franchise as Postal, any picture from it could be viewed as offensive. And since we responding by youtube videos now:
Yes, it's longer video, but some parts are more entertaining.

Yes, that's how it's become. But it doesn't mean that it is ok

"To you only the results count and if the results are bad, you are just going to sack someone."
Your assumption. You have no idea how I run things.

I've made mistakes, and then learned from them. It would be negligent of me to repeat the things in the past that caused problems, whether mine or was someone else's. If a customer takes wrong something I say, then I either need to not say that thing any more, or else clarify and inform the customers better the next time so as to not leave room for misunderstanding. This is the opposite of what twitter allows so one must know to take special care when using that tool.

"I get it, you are just one of those kinds of people."
Your assumption. Don't assume my 'kind of people'.

"I'm just glad I don't work for someone like you where the heads will roll over any problem."
A) Your assumption. B) Yes, if a vendor repeatedly causes me difficulties then I will not use that vendor in the future. That's business pragmatism. C) I hope you don't own a business that is responsible for the payroll of other people, if you think that the last two tweets are examples of good business-building marketing that helps your company take care of all the people who work there. Because it's clear that they are not. Further, note that there is a big difference between internal problems that never leave the premises and external problems that get public attention.

"The fact the circumstances don't matter to you just shows you are the sort of manager that cares nothing for those "lesser folk" below you."
Your assumption. I get the circumstances. I explained so in my previous two posts. Lessons should have been learned from the first two incidents, regardless of the intent (which, to me, seemed harmless). It looks like the lessons were not learned.

Keep in mind that caring for the employees means caring for the well-being of ALL of them and not cherry-picking one out of the rest.

"It doesn't matter than these other flaps were over nothing such as the one over the PC Master Race group. Nope, that's negative publicity to you and that is always bad."
Your assumption. What matters is that the earlier flaps were warning signs, and those signs were subsequently ignored. When the early innocent tweets raise ire, a company should learn to be extra careful when using that media. In the last two tweets they weren't careful. At all. You see the results, but willfully ignore that they were easily avoidable if one took the time to review what happened the first two times.

"Doesn't matter that your employee got doxxed and harassed by the outrage mob. In your uncaring opinion, he deserved what he got."
You might go back and read again what I've written. Earlier (maybe it was the other thread), I said that doxxing was definitely wrong. In the post you quoted here, I specifically said "don't start thinking folks in the thread are happy someone left the company." That includes me. Maybe you're confusing my posts with those from someone else. What I did say is that I understand WHY the decision was made. I don't *like* that someone is gone. I also don't like that the company was put in that position through carelessness.

"Yet, PCMR is a group, focused on PC gaming enthusiasts which should be a valuable asset in growing the company. But hey, GoG did the right thing in your opinion by throwing them under the bus and backing down to the mob over an opinionated outrage mob"
Your completely incorrect assumption. Read through and find where I've rendered a negative verdict on the PCMR matter, except as an abstract - without mentioning it by name - that points out one should be careful with social media. A warning sign that what seems harmless to you might spark ire in others, regardless of intent. I don't recall coming anywhere close to saying that was a bad tweet.

"that weren't buying your games anyway because they have already declared your company sexist for the Witcher series because of "sex cards", lack of a female protagonist, and that women aren't always the good guys and can be harmed because some self-proclaimed cultural critic put CDPR on her hitlist years ago."
Your assumption, that there isn't an overlap of the offended and customers. And so what? That's their opinion. A dumb one, sure. Still doesn't excuse the ineptitude of the last two tweets.

"Not to mention the lack of diversity because they think Poland is a backward country led by fascists. And if you think I'm joking about this, maybe you should read the posts on the forum that sent the outrage mob or look at some of the tweets of that cultural critic with respect to Poland or Japan and her opinion about their cultures. These are not GoG's customers. They've spewed bile in GoG's general direction for years."
Another warning sign to be careful when posting on social media.

"But hey, let's fire your employees over it and demoralize the existing staff. What a wonderful move."
Your assumption. Some - maybe most - staff might be relieved that the marketing will go back to talking about games, instead of sparking the 'outrage mob' through intent or carelessness. Neither of us know how - or if - it's talked about within the company, nor the overall picture of how the rank-and-file feel about it.

"I don't think you really understand the arrogance of some of these West Coast Americans. They already look down upon the rest of the country, but when it comes to 2nd world nations like Poland, Russia or Japan with backwards non-progressive cultures in their opinions, their arrogance just grows. GoG is never going to win these people over. I'm sure they thought opening an office in America might help, but I'm sure those sent over here already found out the hard way."
You continually ignore the point that the earlier tweets stirred up a hornets nest. The smart move, once it's realized that you can't kill them off with bug spray, is to avoid crossing paths with them.

"The Polygon's and Kotaku's and VG247's of this world are not the gaming journalists any game developer should care about."
They absolutely SHOULD care about them. You spoke earlier about people who weren't buying the games anyway. Readers of those sites ARE buying games. You might not like what they say, but that doesn't mean that there are no paying / potential customers using those sites. They have an audience that will read and (hopefully) evaluate both the good and bad things written about the company. Part of the job of marketing is to make sure those outlets have no reasons to write bad things. Don't give them room to misconstrue things; instead, they posted a .gif that lets them think "Wow, gOg is metaphorically pissing on our graves." You don't think that could upset all sorts of members of the game journal corps, whether or not they individually get involved in the issues you pointed out?

"They are just here to create controversy so people see what crazy dumb stuff they write next which grants them ad views and thus revenue. They gave up the concept of objective game reviews year's ago. You can't win with them. If there is a controversy that can be spun, they will do it."
So don't give them anything to spin. If one simply sticks to marketing games, this isn't difficult to accomplish.

"Just as they did with Witcher 3 reviews at first praising the game before going on a diatribe about how racist and misogynistic the game is. I'm sure their readers ended up with such a good impression of the game, don't you?"
Did the readers buy the games anyway? Why assume that the readers are agreeing with everything they say, and then purchase accordingly? TW3 sold massively, you know.

"These magazines are the one's cultivating the outrage for their own benefits (ad revenue) and it's not going to stop no matter what GoG does. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out, you will see the same thing again. They will praise the gameplay (if it good) and then give a backhand slap exposing all the non-gameplay related cultural deficiencies for the rest of the review to appease their rabid outrage-prone fan base. Mark my words..."
So what? You think gOg / CDPR is the only one dealing with this? Either way, it's not about the reviews. It's about needlessly poking the hornets nest with tweets, after twice before getting stung when simply walking nearby.

"Dang - I don't know why I keep getting stung!" Really? Most of us it figured it out the first time.

----

Anyway, don't presume to know how I run things, or that I don't care for people I work with. What you're describing is to put the needs of one above the needs of the company. That can be a disservice to all of the other people counting on a paycheck, and further be a disservice to the customers. But hey - stick to your guns for this one person, regardless of what detrimental effects that person's actions may have caused to the fellow employees and the company.

You post that nothing was done wrong, that it's all on the company or the 'outrage mob'. To a small degree, you're right - at least for the first two instances. But that job is one that requires the paid pro to understand the media upon which the marketing efforts are placed. When one sees what happened the first two times and then later causes similar reactions with content that clearly was NOT innocuous - and in one case had almost nothing to do with the store and its products - then I think the wrong person is in that job. "They shouldn't react that way!" Maybe not, but they do. So why deal with those reactions - and in the process risk making a head-slapping mistake that irritates everybody - when it's easier and less-time consuming to avoid the reactions from the get-go?

I don't have to LIKE someone getting canned in order to understand WHY that person is no longer there.

I'll start with that, because it's the basis of a lot of other assumptions. And it's, itself, a very unprofessionally naive assumption within that report. The first step in (soft and hard) science is to define the terms unambiguously, in order to build a collective reflexion without the blur of miscommunications and shifting meanings. This alone is a large part of the work. But when you make quantitative polls, you have to keep in mind that you are not adressing scientists that went through that trouble. You're adressing people who have a "common sense" understanding (and usage) of a term, and "common sense" is subjective, it's subcultural. It's also fluctuating : people who have no reason to fixate some reference definition tend to use a term differently in different circumstances. That's how ordinary, living, language works, outside of legal or scientific fields (and even within the latter, a meaning can vary from author to author - thankfully explicitely).

It is the case with many "common sense" notions, that sound obvious and are anything but. Patriotism, identity, gender, tolerance, freedom, freedom of speech, family, god, love, friendship, lie, terrorism, corruption, theft, prostitution, honour, dignity, nature, culture, art, game, fascism, violence, good, evil, feminism, racism, intelligence, strength, cowardice, weakness, dignity, etc.. etc... All these everyday words sound obvious, we use them in everyday communications without thinking of it, but in reality, they contain very different things for different people. And qualitative studies are required to explore their local contents. In everyday life, we shrug off the variations. But differences appear, for instance, when people start adding "true" or "real" before these words, hinting at an awareness of these variations. It appears when you support remote struggles based on their slogans or general ideas, and notice afterwards that, in practice, their applications don't match your expectations. Or, more commonly, when people from different ideological group seemingly accuse each others of the same things, that is, use the same words against each others (and in self-definition), with a difference of implied content. You're a fascist. No, YOU're a fascist. No, I fight for freedom. No, that's NOT freedom. Yadda.

"Politically correct" is even more vulnerable than these basic notions, as it's a more elaborate construct. Consider this : The term's origin is in extreme-right currents pushing back against antiracist trends starting to policy or silence their discourses. But my first encounter with this term was in writings from (french) leftist anarchism, using it to denounce the oppressive bourgeois standards of decency and politeness. Calling out the latent racism of colonial France, the bigotry of political religiosity, the hypocrisy of national identities or self-serving, patronizing charities, etc. In that context, "political correctness" was the respect of conservative values and their naturalistic myth of immanence. "Political correctness" was the pressure against crude and derisive descriptions of the self-satisfied facade of society from satirists, comedians, caricature journals, and sociologists.

Such satire is now commonplace, and a lot of the shockingly counter-cultural values of that era are now widely accepted. Common sense has shifted, to a large extend, in our cultures. Other norms and values are now dominant (on a surface level, people usually "know" now that racism is bad, sexism is bad, pollution is bad, authoritarianism is bad - and when they are guilty of it on some level, at least they usually try to present it as something else instead of proudly embracing it). So, normative consensus, against which some individual push back by calling it "political correctness", has shifted content as a whole. But it's never a homogeneous change, and, in the world, or within one country, groups of people always feel oppressed by currents which representatives feel oppressed in return by them. It's partly subjective, but depends a lot on contexts - areas, parts of societies, subcultures, moments, situations, etc.

The result of it is that "political correctness", as a label, has a complex history of being used to designate opposite discourses in different contexts (place, time, etc). It's not a reliable, univocal idea. A given discourse can be arbitrarily designated as p.c. by someone and not someone else. The only common idea is the subjective feeling of one's discourse being wrongly stigmatized as shameful by others, but genuinely shameful discourses exist ("oh no, the p.c. brigade would criminalize me as a pedophile"). Also, as the awareness of the artificiality and ambiguity of this notion spreads, some people are more and more reluctant to use it seriously.

Now, take the opposite. "Hate speech" as it is being called nowadays. It has (for partly different reasons) the same level of ambiguity. Genocide apologists would of course call "politically correct" all discredit brought to their motives (and see the "hatred" in the discourses of antinazis against them). But in the whole spectrum of racist discourses (including unconscious ones, or deliberate backhanded ones betting on deniability, or "mild" ones that "simply" hierarchize populations "without wishing harm", or culturalist variants, or naive well-meaning anthropological ignorance, etc) where would a limit be set ? I mean, a limit beyond which it would be called "hate speech" by objective standards, and below which criticizing it would be illegitimate "political correctness" ? It's a rhetorical question. The point is : people disagree about that. Which mean that people define "hate speech" differently, and thus define differently the threshold of "abusively normative discourse stigmatization".

This is what is illustrated by the huge overlap between people complaining about "too much hate speech" and "too much political correctness". Curbing what you'd call "hate speech" is "political correctness" from the standpoint of those hate speech pundits. The targets of those that you'd judge as "politically correct" are "hate speech" proponents in their eyes. And, in some contexts, normalized "hate speech" is "political correctness" itself. These categories vary widely in-between. You can try to define them precisely, but that's still different from guessing (or establishing through qualitative fieldwork) the individual definitions of the polled people.

And now for other generalities :

You could very well designate one seemingly innocent tweet as "hate speech". I don't think it's the case with the hashtag re-use. I reserve my judgement on "assume gender" : in itself, I don't see it as problematic, but I don't know the role of this meme in transphobic circles, this would require a much broader analysis of Linko's intent and that meme's usage. Take for instance Pepe the Frog. Against the will of its author, it had become a rallying icon for alt-right freaks. It's its usage (language functions merely on such conventions : a sign holding a meaning that local interlocutors agree on). You could imagine a PR practitioner tweeting Pepe the Frog as such, a wink to the extreme right. In that case, if he works for a company that doesn't wish to be associated to that current, he would be fired. Claiming that it's just a cartoon frog would be a fallacy (a swastika is also just a hindu symbol, yet it could be argued that it is "hate speech", in the sense that, because of its usage, it would show support for the discourse and ideology of racial hate movements). You could also imagine a PR practitioner tweeting Pepe the Frog as a fun cartoon, in ignorance of its usage. That would be a bad mistake - whether it justify being fired or not is another question. Hate groups do play a lot with this sort of ambiguity, showing signs and denying their intent, that is why judgement should always be contextual.

What I am saying is not an assumption about Linko (only those who know him can guess his intents). But just pointing out that a whole discourse can be carried by innocent-looking keywords or icons. That there is no general rule such as "it's just a tweet so no big deal". And that we are too far from the required info for strong opinions.

And lastly, I have absolutely no idea about the proportion of GOG customers who would agree/disagree with all those positions around this story. Nothing in there, or elsewhere, gives me any reliable hint on that. Again, if you base yourself on such report's polls, you overlook the question of what each polled individual would deem "hate speech", "politically correct" or "politically incorrect".

But, generally, I assume that gog's decisions are taken based on much less superficial considerations than this thread's empty speculations.

You totally missed the point of research that PanzerFranzz linked. It says that 7% of people in US believe that our society (or rather societies) is wrong and need radical changes. And 80% are tired of those 7% pushing their agenda and creating a political divide.

After doing a little digging this study appears to be not very reputable, at least, not from a scientific perspective. It has not been peer reviewed or tested. It was developed by a biased think tank, with authors that I can find no evidence of previous publications or research for. They don't follow any rigorous scientific methods.

That's not to say there is no value in the study. The numbers they present don't seem to be saying anything too far out there, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. This is not a properly conducted scientific study.