You won’t find too much dish about dining-hall fare or top classes and professors, but you will find much about the hottest dishes and “sluttiest” students at the 60 colleges and universities registered on JuicyCampus.com, an online gossip forum launched in 2007 by Duke alum Matt Ivester. Word about JuicyCampus has spread as quickly as gossip itself, and the site has rapidly become the “Gossip Girl” of the college set and the bane of students nationwide, as it has evolved from a friendly forum where students can gush about the latest happenings at their schools to a virtual cesspool where students can trash each other anonymously, one rant at a time.
Students’ most taboo, politically incorrect thoughts find refuge on JuicyCampus.com, as they namelessly post their candid opinions without fear of retaliation. For instance, in one of the most vicious and “most viewed” Juicy topics, a student from the University of Pittsburgh, using a real girl’s name, posts that the featured girl is a “drunken slut.” “She is just such a slutty bitch,” the writer seethes. “What a worthless human being.” Another Pittsburgh student agrees, writing in one of the 18 “Reply” threads that the girl is “white trash through and through.” Another popular topic––marked by more than 6,232 views and 34 replies––reads, “Sorority Girls have the personality of non-fat frozen yogurt from Rite Aid.” The UC Santa Barbara student who started this thread fumes nonsensically about the “sorostitutes” at the university––shorthand for promiscuous sorority girls.
Yet some of the site’s tamer threads are rather endearing. One anxious male from Duke, who is “terrified of asking girls out on dates” and finds the hookup scene “far from satisfying,” asks users for tips on how to snag a girlfriend. “I doubt I create any sort of sexual attraction because I just can’t do what many of my drinking buddies can, be aggressive and touchy with the girl which is one of the tricks to forming sexual attraction,” he confesses in the topic “Tired Of Being Single.” “I am terrified of being single for the rest of my life.” Another male student from Loyola Marymount University writes about falling in love with a girl in the library in the topic “Dear girl at the library.” “I saw u there last thursday night you were blonde and wearing a grey cape or something,” the guy posts. “u went to the bathroom like 6 times which I thought was weird but I don’t care. Every time u walked by u were humming. Normally I hate when people hum but you were humming a different xmas song every time… Sometimes u were even snapping. At one point u tripped and then laughed at urself even though u were walking alone. Dear girl in the library…you make me happy.”
But such sweet, comical posts have become increasingly outnumbered by vicious, even scatological diatribes. As more hateful threads are being posted, and as more feelings are getting hurt, the more college students are asking “where is the love?” and urging the site’s administrators to take action and censor the most offensive posts. Pepperdine’s Student Government Association has taken the issue the most seriously, asking the university in a resolution passed 23-5 to ban campus access to the site entirely. Students from other schools have even begun posting their criticisms of the site. A UC San Diego student writes that JuicyCampus is “an anonymous way for people who have low self-esteem and have no lives to feel better about themselves by making people they don’t even know feel like shit.”
While Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act safeguards JuicyCampus administrators by stating that Web forum owners cannot be held responsible for the material and opinions posted by their users, the students who have been badmouthed on the site, like one unidentified Cornell junior featured in the Associated Press article “Backlash hits JuicyCampus.com,” are worried that such disparaging threads could be picked up by future employers or family members innocently surfing the web. But JuicyCampus emphasizes in the privacy section of its site that its threads are blocked from search engines like Google to protect users’ anonymity. “Your privacy is important to us,” JuicyCampus assures users. “And that’s why we don’t even make you register. It is not possible for anyone to use this website to find out who you are or where you are located.”
Moreover, in a letter dated February 29, 2008, and published by JuicyCampus’s founder on the “Official JuicyCampus Blog,” Ivester writes that the site was meant be a forum for friendly gossip and laments that the site has become offensive and derogatory: “We want to make JuicyCampus Juicy not hateful.” But isn’t friendly gossip an oxymoron?
