The kinds of comments that used to be scrawled inside a bathroom stall are now posted for the world to read on Web sites encouraging college students to talk trash about their classmates.
“Chico sluts: Gimme some names” is a discussion thread on the California State University, Chico, section of CollegeACB.com. It includes 77 responses that name many enrolled students and make detailed allegations about who’s done what with whom.
The UC Davis section of the same site includes this comment, posted Friday:
“So far I have hooked up with half of (a women’s sports) team, and I think I might have gotten an STD from one of them. I am seriously freaking out, so if anyone has any information on this that would be very helpful to know who had an STD.”
An anonymous response names someone and says she “used to have crabs.”
The sites reflect a new reality of campus life, blending the age-old penchant for gossip with the anonymity and the wide reach of the Internet. Unlike social networking sites such as Facebook, where people use their real identities and can limit who sees their profile, college gossip Web sites thrive on anonymity and easy access.
At CampusGossip.com the motto is, “Go ahead, tell it like it is … always 100% anonymous.” Anyone with an Internet connection can go there and see pictures and comments that students certainly never intended for their parents’ eyes.
The UC Davis page of CampusGossip.com includes one of the site’s more modest pictures: Two women in hot pink bras and black mini skirts stand arm-in-arm with a third dressed in red lingerie and thigh-high black stockings.
The caption says, “Here are a few of our girls from the Exotica Erotica party at UCD. Who would you pick if you had one night?”
The picture was posted to the site Tuesday. By Friday it had been viewed nearly 18,000 times.
And that’s nothing compared to the page views some pictures on the site have drawn. On the Cal State Long Beach section of CampusGossip.com, a picture of five women dropping their pants has been seen more than 800,000 times since it went up less than two weeks ago.
The Web sites are run by private companies that have no official relationship with the universities – limiting what college officials can do when offended students come to them with complaints.
“This is part of the social media revolution,” said Donald Dudley, associate director of student judicial affairs at UC Davis.
“Students participate in social media – it’s a large part of their world. There are many positive aspects to social media, and this is a darker side.”
Dudley, who oversees student discipline, said he fielded complaints from students last year about JuicyCampus.com – a gossip site no longer in operation. In one case, a female student came to him saying she thought she knew who had posted allegations about her sexual behavior.
Dudley talked to that student, and he admitted responsibility, saying he’d written the comment as a joke and didn’t realize how harmful it could be.
Because the student admitted fault, Dudley said, the university was able to discipline him. But that doesn’t happen in every case. When college officials can’t identify the offender, all they can do is offer support services to the student suffering from unwanted exposure.
“The public nature of having an allegation about you is very upsetting,” Dudley said.
Campus officials across the country breathed a sigh of relief when JuicyCampus shut down in February, citing a lack of ad revenue. The site had been sued by a few students, and attorneys general in two states opened investigations. But now a new wave of similar Web sites is cropping up to fill the void.
Despite the controversy the gossip sites may cause, the law is on their side, said M. Ryan Calo, a fellow with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University’s law school. Under federal law, he said, Web sites generally cannot be held responsible for pictures or comments their users post.
If students want to seek redress for something written about them online, they must go after the commenter – not the Web site. And that’s difficult, Calo said, because most posts are anonymous.
“It’s time-consuming (and) it’s expensive to identify someone who has said something about you on one of these Web sites,” he said.
Some experts argue that the Internet’s anonymous format has been most damaging to women, gays and people of color who are frequently the subject of derogatory anonymous comments on college gossip sites as well as other types of sites. But Calo said the legal protection for Web sites to allow anonymous comments helps Internet businesses thrive.
“The ability to comment somewhere anonymously is important,” he said.
“The fact that some people are getting disparaged and have no recourse is an unfortunate side effect.”
Rick Rees, associate director of student activities at Chico State, said his students are so used to online rumor-mongering that they no longer take umbrage at the chatter on campus gossip sites.
“I sense there’s a desensitization … now that we’re in to the second or maybe third generation of these things,” he said.
Many students interviewed this week at UC Davis were unaware of the gossip sites. Those who were familiar with them said they’re another form of online bullying – something many people of their generation have come to accept as a normal part of the social landscape.
Rosalyn Li, 21, said the sites proliferate because people “can get away with it.”
“You can remain anonymous,” she said, “And if you don’t like someone, you can dish dirt on them.”