The Fierce Courage of Anonymity (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Long ago in a galaxy far away, I left a few anonymous comments on articles on the Arkansas Times’ new blog. They weren’t hateful or provocative or particularly opinionated. I thought I had some information to add on the subject but wasn’t sure it was a good idea for me to contribute to another company’s news product.

I was soon reminded that the ability to make anonymous comments brought out the worst in people. I first learned that lesson when I ventured online in 1992, using a dial-up bulletin board called Prodigy, and got involved in a discussion about presidential candidate Bill Clinton. I thought I knew a little something about the subject — I had been observing him since I was in high school — but I fled almost immediately. I wasn’t used to being called a streetwalker by faceless, nameless strangers.

The kind of comments that became common on the Arkansas Blog, invariably left by people hiding behind screen names, made me resolve to give up anonymous posting. If I’m not willing to own my words online, just as I own them here, I just don’t need to post them. It’s a personal standard that has helped me navigate the social media age.

While it’s relatively easy to control one’s personal climate on Facebook, Twitter is an entirely different ecosystem. I’m selective about which accounts I follow, sticking mainly with mainstream news sources and Never Trump commentators who remind me what conservatives used to stand for. Also a few humor accounts like You Had One Job and stress relievers like Emergency Kittens.

But being who I am and doing the job I do, I am subjected to insults and profanity and incredibly hateful lies. The people who indulge in such behavior almost never do it under their actual names.

Late last year, Amnesty International UK released a study of almost a quarter-million tweets sent to 778 women politicians and journalists in the U.S. and the United Kingdom in 2017. The study, using both human volunteers and artificial intelligence, estimated that abusive tweets were sent to women in those roles an average of every 30 seconds — about 7% of the tweets directed to them.

“Politicians and journalists faced similar levels of online abuse and we observed both liberals and conservatives alike, as well as left and right leaning media organisations, were affected,” according to the report.

One thing did dramatically increase the likelihood of being targeted for Twitter abuse: skin color. One in 10 tweets mentioning black women was abusive or problematic, compared with 1 in 15 for white women.

I have a troll on Twitter who, because I don’t share his deep admiration for Donald Trump’s morals and character, routinely calls my dead mother a truckstop prostitute. (He does it anonymously, of course, cheating his own mother out of the opportunity to be super proud.) That kind of abuse directed at little ol’ me made last week’s incident involving conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens all the more baffling.

Stephens quit Twitter altogether after a professor from George Washington University made an objectively mild crack about him in response to a report that the Times building was infested with bedbugs. “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens,” tweeted Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs (of all things).

How Stephens even heard about the tweet is a mystery. He wasn’t tagged in it, nor was it retweeted by any of Karpf’s followers. But Stephens was hugely offended by what he compared to the language of “totalitarian regimes.” He emailed Karpf a challenge to call him a bedbug to his face — and copied the email to the provost at GWU. As Karpf acknowledged in an interview with Emma Pettit, a former Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter now working for The Chronicle of Higher Education, it’s good to be a white male with tenure.

Having the complaint copied to his provost was the clincher for Karpf, who said — despite Stephens’ denials — that it was clearly an effort to exploit his status with The New York Times to intimidate an obscure critic. And that, Karpf said, is why he shared Stephens’ thin-skinned reaction with the Twittersphere, where Stephens was pummelled mercilessly. (I personally expressed some sympathy, because being called a metaphorical bedbug could not possibly have been the singular cause for such petulance.)

But here’s the most important point: Stephens was able to email Karpf because he used his actual identity, complete with place of employment, on his Twitter account. And that may well be the reason Karpf’s comment was so mild in the first place. When we take ownership of our words, we may not always be at our best, but we are less likely to be at our worst.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.