Given President Trump has extended the Bret Stephens “bedbug” controversy into another day by tweeting about it, I thought it was a good opportunity to articulate what I believe to be the best policy for handling those who insult you on Twitter.
For those who may stumble upon this post down the road, I will briefly recount the controversy. Those who are intimately familiar with it can skip to the next paragraph. Everything started on Monday, when, in response to a report of bedbugs in the New York Times newsroom, George Washington University professor Dave Karpf joked, “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.” Stephens responded with a bizarre letter to Karpf about civility on Twitter, which invited Karpf to dinner to meet his wife and kids and then “call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.” What really made things blow up was that Stephen’s cc’d the university provost, essentially tattling on Karpf. To make a long story short: Stephens overreacted to what, by Twitter standards, was a mild insult, and then Twitter overreacted by piling on Stephens all day Tuesday. And with the pile on getting the presidential seal of approval, we’ve now entered another day of “bed bug” Twitter.
Twitter often is a toxic waste dump, to be sure. But having been active on the forum for over a decade now, the only way I’ve remained sane is to develop my own set of rules. And one of my main rules is the best way to respond to insults is to ignore them. I don’t always follow my own rule. Sometimes, I can’t resist mocking somebody who insults me. Other times, I may highlight a particularly egregious tweet to raise awareness about the anti-Semitism faced by Jewish writers. But by and large, ignoring the haters is the best response.
The way I see it, I get to be paid to offer my opinions publicly. It’s natural that as an extension of that, I’m going to incur the wrath of some people who disagree with me. In the modern world, social media insults are just a natural consequence of publicly arguing about politics. Anybody who is in this business has to be able to learn to brush things off, or they’re going to be really unhappy.
To my astonishment, there are some people with other day jobs, who nonetheless spend countless hours on social media harassing writers. Not sure what the motivation is for internet trolling, but as far as I can tell, the biggest goal is simply to get attention. So it doesn’t make much sense to provide them with the attention they seek, or to give them the satisfaction of knowing they’re getting under your skin.
Short of actual death threats, social media should be viewed as a freewheeling space where people are going to say a lot of insulting things to you, particularly if your job is to state your opinions on the internet on a daily basis.
