The backstabbing, scandalous blogs of the television show, “Gossip Girl,” ends with each show at 9 p.m. on Mondays, and the Burn Book was just a creation of Lindsay Lohan and the other mean girls, right? Wrong.
College students across the country are finding themselves the subject of demeaning posts on the Web site Juicycampus.com .
The site is a forum where students can anonymously post messages or create discussions – many of which use the full names of others or of sororities and fraternities – or even invite others to comment on the “best boobs” or the “biggest slut” on campus.
While Fairfield University is not registered with the site, many other schools across the country are.
Students from unregistered schools cannot make posts, but the general public – including parents, teachers and future employers – can, and do, read the comments.
“The professional therapists at Counseling and Psychological Services find this site offensive,” said Susan Birge, assistant vice principle and director of Counseling Services at Fairfield University. “It is cyber cruelty and cyber alienating.”
College students are constantly warned about the risks of future employers checking out Facebook.com and MySpace.com , where they can see pictures, groups, and posted personal information.
The extent of personal material posted on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are, for the most part, posted by the individual site owner. Editing the page is as simple as logging on and deleting drunken pictures and inside jokes that only the closest of friends will find inoffensive.
Even easier is adding the privacy option. With conscientious editing, there is no reason to be judged unfairly for one’s Facebook and MySpace profiles if one does not wish to be.
Juicycampus does not offer this luxury. Posted material cannot be deleted or edited by anyone once it is posted, and anyone with Internet access can pull up tales of one’s sexual or drunken exploits.
The site has spurred such controversy that Pepperdine University’s student government association voted to ban access to the site on the campus network on Jan. 23, according to an editorial by the newspaper staff of The Lariat , Baylor University’s student newspaper.
According to an Associated Press article , one student at Cornell University, which is registered with Juicycampus.com, first experienced the site’s wrath when he received a text message from a friend between classes telling him to check out Juicycampus.com.
“The student found his name on the Web site beside a rambling, filthy passage about his sexual exploits, posted by an anonymous student on campus. The young man could only hope the commentary was so ridiculous nobody would believe it,” the article said.
According to the editorial from Baylor University, Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act of 1996 protects Web site operators from being held liable for defamatory statements posted by participants on message boards.
Because Juicycampus allows users to post anonymously, if a lawsuit is filed, the only way a perpetrator’s identity can be found is through an IP address.
Thus, attacks via the Web site are legal, and identifying one’s attacker may be impossible for anyone trying to press a libel suit.
“Web sites like Juicycampus.com ultimately rely on students to provide content,” said Fairfield communications professor David Gudelunas. “Ironically the same students producing the site’s content are also packaged and sold to advertisers who buy their attention.”
“Not to completely devalue gossip as a legitimate form of communication,” said Gudelunas, “but I hope that students have more important things to write while here at college than some material for a Web site that ultimately gets sold back to them.”
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