This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost.

Courtesy of David Karpf

David Karpf expected more likes on his pretty good but admittedly not great joke.

On Monday the associate professor in George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs read on Twitter that the New York Times newsroom was experiencing an outbreak of bedbugs. His feed was full of riffs, so he tried out his own: “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

Karpf did not tag the conservative columnist, who has opined about attacks from the left on free speech and the “necessity of discomfort,” especially among the younger generation. The professor’s joke, with its zero retweets and nine likes, according to Karpf, left not even a ripple in Twitter’s vast ocean. He was mildly disappointed. But then he got an email from Stephens himself, who had read the tweet, got upset, and cc’ed Karpf’s provost.

The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens. https://t.co/k4qo6QzIBW

— davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 26, 2019

“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard,” the columnist wrote, according to a screenshot of the email that Karpf tweeted. “I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face. That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part.” (Stephens did not immediately respond to an interview request. The provost, Forrest Maltzman, said in a written statement that Karpf speaks for himself. The provost also invited Stephens to come to the GW campus to speak about civil discourse in the digital age.)

Karpf posted the email, and a social-media storm ensued, which is also convenient for Karpf because he studies strategic political communication on the internet. He spoke with The Chronicle about why he believes Stephens’s email was about asserting power, not about seeking civil discourse, and why the ordeal would have been far less funny if he was not a cis white male with tenure. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Could you explain your mind-set for your initial joke and what you expected to get out of it? My guess is not much, initially.

All of Bret Stephens’s articles are about things like climate-change denial, or how Democrats need to focus on people like Bret Stephens in order to win elections, or how college campuses are no longer zones for free speech, all of which are in areas that I and the people I follow on Twitter actually study for a living. So every time he writes an article, my Twitter feed explodes with people complaining about it, finding it low-key annoying, talking about how you just can’t get rid of the guy. So I thought the best joke that I could come up with is: Bedbugs are a metaphor. Bedbugs are Bret Stephens.

It’s not my best joke. But I thought it was pretty funny. When I was walking home from work that night, I saw that I had gotten zero retweets and nine likes, and I had a moment of sadness because I thought I was going to get, like, maybe three retweets and 20 likes.

Then I got an email from Bret Stephens. He also apparently emailed the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs separately. So Stephens decided that not only he needed to reach out to me to talk about civil discourse on the internet, but that he also needed to make sure that everyone above me in GW’s hierarchy was aware of this so that I could get in trouble for it.

And it’s that second point that is both ethically wrong of him and strategically dumb of him. If he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have shared his response on Twitter. But he is so obviously overreacting. It is so out of step with the comments that he’s constantly writing in his New York Times column about how campuses need to allow for speech that makes people feel uncomfortable, and yet here he is, trying to get a professor in trouble for making a comment, not to him, that made him feel uncomfortable. It converts the entire communication from being him calling for civility to him trying to enact harm to me because of his social standing and social status.

If Stephens had not cc’ed the provost or contacted the director, but sent you the exact same email, what do you think your reaction would have been?

I was going to ask if this was a bit. Like, is somebody joking? Then I would have engaged seriously and said: “Look. The reason why I don’t think this is a breach of civility is that when you are a public intellectual, people make jokes about you on the internet. And this isn’t even all that bad of a joke. I’m happy to discuss civility in the digital age with you, but I don’t feel particularly guilty about this.” If he hadn’t cc’ed the provost, that email would have been surprising and random and a nice opportunity to procrastinate.

But since he cc’ed my provost, that meant that he was trying to enact his power and create a cost for my joke, which means this isn’t about civility at all, and so I didn’t treat it as being about civility. It was not an earnest invite to talk this through. It was an invite to feel shame and face consequences for saying something bad about him online.

So the fact that Stephens emailed the provost — that undercut his assertion that he wanted to have a conversation?

Right. He was trying to make clear his social standing, and trying to make sure that the provost knew that one of his professors was offending somebody at The New York Times. I think this comes down to the Spider-Man principle: With great power comes great responsibility. He has social power as an op-ed columnist at the Times. He knows that, and in sending this message, he is trying to exploit that to scare people into not saying mean things about him on the internet. First of all, strategically, that’s not how the internet works. Second of all, ethically, there is a responsibility that comes with having that perch at the Times.

And if he’s doing this to me, it means that he would also be doing this to an assistant professor or to an adjunct professor. If he can’t take that responsibility seriously, then he shouldn’t have that social power.

I wasn’t scared of this because I have tenure, and I’m confident that I did nothing wrong. But if this had come to me a few years ago, when I didn’t have tenure, I would have been terrified. Because you don’t really want to get on the provost’s radar as the person who’s offended a columnist at The New York Times. If Stephens had sent me this email then, I would have been far more reticent to share the experience because I wouldn’t know how that would affect going up for tenure. When you’re in that position of still having to fear for your job, you’re naturally more cautious in what you’re willing to say.

Do you think Stephens doesn’t understand the power that you say he’s wielding, or rather, he thinks that because of that power, he deserves more respect?

It’s pretty obviously the latter. Apparently he explained on MSNBC that he wasn’t reaching out to the provost to get me in trouble. He was reaching out to the provost because the provost ought to know what his employees are saying. (“I had no intention whatsoever to get him in any kind of professional trouble,” Stephens said on the program, “but it is the case at The New York Times and other institutions that people should be aware, managers should be aware, of the way in which their people, their professors or their journalists, interact with the rest of the world.”)

Which, no. Those are the same thing. And again, this is a milquetoast tweet, particularly because it is directly referencing and linking to the tweet about the New York Times newsroom having bedbugs. I’m not calling him a bedbug. I’m calling him a metaphorical bedbug. And he knows that, because there’s only two sentences in the joke, and one of them says, “This is a metaphor.”

He’s bright enough to understand what’s going on there. He’s thin-skinned enough to be offended by it. Also, clearly, he has enough of an ego that he decides that people shouldn’t be allowed to make such milquetoast jokes about him because he’s at The New York Times, and that means he’s better than that. That’s an abuse of power. That’s an abuse of authority. And it makes this entire episode entirely his fault. He did this to himself.

Your work includes studying viral content. What is it like being inside the machine?

It’s bizarre and pretty funny. But it’s bizarre and pretty funny because I’m a white guy and this was so milquetoast. I’ve gotten one random call from somebody who wanted to yell at me. But if I was a woman, if I was a person of color, if I was not a cis white straight male, then I would be enduring far worse than this all of the time, and I’m sure the middle of this Twitterstorm would include a bunch of death threats. Instead, this is gleeful and distracting. I was up until 3:30 in the morning last night, partially working on a conference paper and partially looking at all the jokes that people are making.

But I’m tenured, and I did nothing wrong, and I study this stuff for a living, so I could see immediately: “My God, man. You’re Streisand effect-ing yourself.” That created a context in which this could be entertaining for me instead of scary for me.

Could you explain the Streisand effect?

There was a photo taken of Barbra Streisand’s house. It was put on the internet. She was very upset about that so started demanding that it be taken down, and that led the photo, which no one was seeing, to get shared widely, and everyone saw it. That led to this term, the Streisand effect, where the act of complaining about something online is what leads to people see said thing online.

My original joke, which had zero retweets and nine likes when this started off, it’s now at about 3,500 retweets and 22,100 likes. The follow-up tweet saying that he emailed me has about 8,800 retweets and 56,900 likes. If Stephens had just left this alone, then we would still be at zero and nine, and I would be having a normal day, handling university administration and prepping for a conference. Since he decided to complain, he has turned this into a thing.

Are there other lessons that you see in the whole experience?

I don’t think the lesson here is that you should never cc the provost. The lesson is that you should be cc’ing the provost when the actual content is bad enough to make that worthwhile. If I had been tweeting death threats at him, it would be entirely in bounds for him to respond from his New York Times email account and say, I noticed your death threats, and cc the provost.

But given that my joke got no traction and that it’s so mundane, that means that his response is fully unproportional to the initial joke. When your response is so out of proportion to the initial joke, like, he thinks when he’s doing that, it’s because he has the power, and I don’t. That’s a misunderstanding of how power and information travel in the digital age. Because there’s an entire internet full of people who already find the guy to be annoying and hard to get rid of. When he engages in this caricature of himself, that’s then a thing that everyone is going to share online.

I talk to a lot of professors who are targeted online, not just on social media but by the right-wing practice of filming liberal professors and churning up hysteria, on various websites, about what professors teach. I’m always curious to talk to people who actually study the internet. That anger and fervor, has that always existed? Or is the internet playing a role in creating something new here?

Both. I think the sense that campuses are liberal hotbeds where conservative ideas are suppressed, that’s certainly a perspective that dates back decades and decades. And also, there’s a new model with operations like Project Veritas, where people have realized that there is money and power to be had in finding cases of a professor saying a thing, which can be taken out of context, and turning that into a college celeb who then gets on Fox News and also gets a bunch of donors to support their work. So that makes the baseline of complaints, which I think have always been there, spikier and more threatening.

Do you think there’s a free-speech crisis, or issues surrounding free speech, on college campuses today?

There are issues about free speech on campus because there have always been issues about free speech on campus. To lay my cards on the table, I’m an Oberlin alum. I think the biggest free-speech crisis on campus right now is that we currently have a court precedent, this Oberlin Gibson’s Bakery case, which, if it holds true, would mean that universities can be held liable for the protest speech of their students, to the tune of millions of dollars. If that precedent holds, that will be a free-speech crisis on campus because that will force campuses to lock down any student protest out of fear that they can be sued for millions of dollars with nuisance lawsuits. That’s a potential brewing free-speech crisis, but beyond that, I don’t think there’s anything particularly special happening right now.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.