Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Gossip – it’s a part of life. Tabloid magazines monopolize bookstores, gyms and checkout lines across the globe. Thanks to JuicyCampus.com, University of Maine students now have the opportunity to gossip to their hearts’ content – not about celebrities, but about each other.
JuicyCampus.com was founded by Matt Ivester in 2007. A 2007 press release from Juicy Campus notes that its mission is to “enable online anonymous free speech on college campuses.” The concept may have been innocent enough, but “Newsweek” has stated that, “the posts have devolved from innocuous tales of secret crushes to . lurid finger-pointing about drug use and sex.”
After starting with 60 schools on its site, Juicy Campus has found lightning in a bottle, spreading to more than 500 campuses nationwide. From Hawaii to Maine, everyone seems to be getting a fever, and the only prescription is more gossip.
Titles of some posts on the UMaine page include “Cuties with Booties,” “SLUTS” and “Biggest Pieces of Scum at UMO.” Some posts have garnered up to 70 replies. With no login information needed, the site is completely anonymous, allowing students to create new posts or reply to older ones without discretion.
Juicy Campus has stated it will not censor any material unless “a court of competent jurisdiction finds that the author of a post is guilty of a crime as a result of that post, or holds that a particular post is defamatory.” The Web site also states that people need to realize everything is merely gossip and “you should take everything you read with a large grain of salt.”
There have been only two instances where Ivester, a Duke University graduate, has reported IP addresses to authorities. The posts, appearing on the Monmouth University and Colgate University pages, involved a student threatening or contemplating shooting people on campus.
One of the more famous cases of controversy spewing from the site comes from Vanderbilt University. Chelsea Gorman, a well-liked, relatively quiet first-year was raped one night while returning to her dorm. In March 2007, a post on JuicyCampus read “Chelsea Gorman Deserved It.” Outrage over the post grew, but nothing could be done. The post was hateful and cowardly, but not necessarily illegal.
So is Juicy Campus at all liable for content posted within its pages? The site claims it is protected by Title 47 U.S.C. Section 230. In 1996, the Communication Decency Act was passed, and Section 230 states that, “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
“Sites like this are merely forums. They do not make posts, nor do they edit them,” said Sol Goldman, attorney and UMaine adjunct professor. “It would seem that they are untouchable.”
Every state has laws protecting those who have been publicly defamed. If someone says something which defames another, the victim can sue that person. But with all Juicy Campus posts coming anonymously, who is there to pursue?
Some may take the same route as Tennessee State University. In November 2008, after receiving numerous complaints from both students and teachers, the vice president of Student Affairs banned access to the site while on the campus network. Ivester responded by filing charges against the school and by stating that TSU had “joined the ranks of the Chinese government in terms of Internet censorship.”
“They are encouraging people to post defamatory content,” Goldman said. “It’s a defamation machine, and one day, they’ll be taken down. Someone, someday will crack their immunity.”
Many UMaine students have been singled out on the site. One student taking the brunt of the hate is third-year international affairs student Ryan Merchant. He was unaware of the site until a friend told him people had been posting suspect information about him.
“When I first saw it, I was extremely offended and appalled,” Merchant said. “For people that just know me by name, and don’t know my character, it can be extremely damaging.”
In a survey of 200 UMaine students, 175 felt the site could severely harm someone’s integrity and character. The other 25 agreed with Juicy Campus, stating that everything posted should be taken with a large grain of salt.
If around 88 percent of UMaine students surveyed agree the site could cause serious negative repercussions, then why does the site receive 1 million unique visits each month? If so many are opposed, why have 20 new topics started on the UMaine page in the past week alone?
Sophomore engineering student Nikolas Bennett believes people gossip to reinforce their own self-esteem.
“Knowing something that somebody else doesn’t seems to appeal to a lot of people. Many people seem to seek some sort of admiration when they express new knowledge, even when it’s of little importance,” Bennett said.
Knox College professor Frank McAndrew, whose psychological research has been featured on “The Today Show,” said gossip is simply part of human nature. In a 2007 article on Knox.edu, McAndrew said “Gossip is not a character flaw, it’s a social skill . For most of our evolutionary history, we lived in small groups, where it would be advantageous for an individual to be interested in everyone else in the group – the good news about our friends and allies, and the bad news about high-ranking individuals and potential rivals.”
As society has evolved, people have grown to live in larger groups. With larger groups comes an increased medium for exchanging knowledge and communicating. Juicy Campus provides a broad audience the opportunity to talk about one another, be it good or bad, productive or barren – even if it’s what Merchant describes as a “catalyst of hate.”
When the majority of posts center around guys who are lacking in size, girls who will sleep with anything that moves or possible carriers of “the clap,” it’s difficult to call the posts good or productive.
Bangor Daily News