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Colleges Struggling With the Digital Bathroom Wall
theodp writes "Back in the day, anonymous character assassination was confined to permanent marker scrawl in bathroom stalls. But now, thanks to sites like the student-run CollegeACB.com (ACB=Anonymous Confession Board), which can get hundreds of thousands of hits on a good day, TIME reports that anonymous slander is going viral on campus. Even the most elite universities — normally the land of the politically correct — have been struggling with the problem of anonymous gossip sites and their very un-PC posts, which an Amherst dean likens to 'the worst of junior high.' If he thinks things are bad now, wait until the kids start getting creative with Google Sidewiki."
Welcome to the internet, please enjoy your stay or GTFO promptly.
Soulskill has herpes!
4chan for Harvard?
Really, it's futile in the long term to try and ban "harassment comments" or whatever you want to call it, unless you want to really compromise free speech and become worse than China. Maybe instead stop being so bloody touchy about stupid things stupid people write? What is it we've told our children for ages - "stop caring, don't give it attention"?
Political Correctness is just a new version of Politeness. Those who make sad and angry noises about PC are just upset that their version of PC is out of style. Perhaps they were Emily Post fans.
We now frown on slurs and other degrading language where once that was celebrated. We now allow discussions of topics in public that were once forced by the Olde PC to be kept private to the determent of those who needed the topics aired.
When someone complains about 'PC' they're just complaining that THEIR version of right/wrong in public has been pushed out by the majority.
Blar.
Just give them the cane some more until morale improves!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Remember back in the day when the internet was for good? It was developed to exchange ideas between thought provoking people in an effort to enhance our way of life and understanding of it. Not now baby, WOOO! Its high school schoolyard antics with a twist... no one knows that you, the bully, are doing the bullying. So now you cant get jacked in the jaw or counter harassed because your life is worse than those you are making fun of. No consequences baby... WOO! Anonymous has its place in society, but this is just abusive.
Complaints about PC are generally not about any version of right or wrong. They are complaints about being required to use, or avoid, language, which it is claimed might offend someone.
I don't care what language you use and do not want to restrict your use of any particular words. You might care what language I use and seek to impose restrictions. Those two approaches are not equivalents and PC falls into the latter.
Just because two people disagree, it does not mean that both views are equal in some way.
Won't this problem be solved by an inevitable lawsuit? I'm hardly a lawyer, but this kind of thing sounds like libel to me. Even if the victim can't find out the identity of the bully, can't they at least go after the people who provided the public forum for the bullying? I'm not just asking rhetorically; I'm genuinely interested in an answer.
This is hardly a new problem. Check out the old "Consumers Guide to MIT Men", a 1970's rating book for MIT men in bed designed to mock the rating guides for easy lays published internally by the fraternities of the day. Sadly, the book failed to mention that the authors were sleeping with drunk boys from the "Strat's Rat" bar at MIT, where the high male/female ratio and cheap liquor contributed to their research.
They tried to censor that, too. And make no mistake: the great desire of university publicity departments and administrators is to shut down such documents, not to prevent slander or libel. We need to be very careful about what actually gets blocked: anonymous has a long, proud history in the US dating back to Thomas Paine and the Federalist papers, and the courts are quite aware of how chilling of free speech even mild restraints can be. The anonymity is critical to protect people from repercussion: www.wikileaks.org is critical proof of this, and I highly recommend it for people to see how amazing the information their bosses and newspapers and governments don't publish really is.
hmmm juicy campus ran out of money and shut down so why the big push to discuss this now?
I'm so going to whore karma with this obligatory Penny-Arcade reference.
Mod redundant at will.
Freedom of speech wears-out only if you don’t use it.
— Maurice Maréchal, founder of the satirical french weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné“.
What's the real reason for the schools' objection to it? I always thought it was because it destroyed school property. If it's virtual, then as a student you have to seek it out to see it, rather than seeing it in the bathroom stalls whether you like it or not. Sounds like it was really about control. They want control over what students say to each other at all times. Heaven forbid students organize in various ways without permission.
on anything that is driven by user content. Unmoderated content is simply useless and the more inter-connected that user accounts become, the better. A cross-site karma system would be excellent, eventually anyone who doesn't want to have to read shit from every moron with a keyboard won't have to. If karma could be propagated across news-sites, IMDB, /., etc. and linked into everyone's Facebook, we'd be better off. I just don't read unmoderated, anonymous content; it's worthless. There will always be fuckwads (sorry, reference to the Penny-Arcade comic another commenter posted) on the Internet, but it doesn't mean we can't flag them as not worth listening to.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Really, consider the fact that what is going on here is nothing more than the same gossip from before, but now in electronic format.
People talk, people gossip, people are social creatures, and as it often appears to be, people are cruel. Just because someone wrote a comment about you on some internet 'bathroom wall' or even a real bathroom wall doesn't mean you have to do anything about it, or even recognize it. In both cases, the anonymity of the posting is its very downfall. On the other hand, if you have people outright spreading gossip and clearly linking it back to themselves (the real-world equivalent of saying "yeah, I wrote that"), then the problem is more pronounced, but still the same as before. You can deal with gossip if you know who starts it, or you can deal with gossip by ignoring it.
If colleges can't teach to their students that gossip is best ignored, then we have more things to worry about than the gossip itself.
A related study has revealed that the most common phrase scribbled on the digital bathroom wall is "For a good time call NTP". Close runners up were enumerations of operating systems that blow, comments on head and tail etc.
FTFA: "ACB logged a record 480,000 hits in one day in early November"
Maybe today will break that record, with it posted up on slashdot now...
If it does, at least I know I contributed! Haha!
If this becomes a big enough problem, states, and later Washington, will pass laws reducing privacy protections for slander.
If this problem gets bad enough, here's how I think it will wash out in 5 or 10 years:
*A claim of slander against a "John Doe" will have to convince a judge there is merit
*The court will consider any obvious mitigating circumstances
*If the request is granted, a subpeona will be issued but the results will not be available to the suing party until the target has had a reasonable chance to quash the subpeona under a pseudonym and other privacy protections
*Reasonable grounds for quashing would include anything that suggests the free-speech, privacy, and other rights of the speaker outweighted the rights of the aggrieved party
*Judges would be encouraged to nip abusive or malicious John Doe lawsuits in the bud
If things don't get bad enough, you won't see wholesale action in the halls of Congress or state legislatures, and schools will have to continue to address this internally.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's a dilemma inherent in our choices of technologies.
If we allow anonymity, people will
(a) Use it for good: whistleblowing on evildoers;
(b) Use it for evil: anonymously libelling the innocent;
If we prohibit anonymity, people will
(a) Use it for good: standing by their assertions;
(b) Use it for evil: track every word you say, stifling whistleblowers and witnesses.
There is no right answer. There are only choices between problems.
-kgj
.. go to Rutgers and pick up a copy of the Medium. Free classified ads to all Rutgers students, no content restrictions, talk whatever kind of trash you please. Most things were along the lines of 'To my damn roommate - take a shower sometime this week and stop whacking off at 3am", or "To the girl in my Wed. night geography class, that sits in front with the red hair, you're such a bitch..", etc. Now, the Medium has its detractors, but does printing these comments on paper somehow make them more legitimate or deserving of protection?
Have you been encased in a cement bunker for 20 years? "PC" is not just about avoiding overt insults or, say, the fact that we have condom ads on television now with a guy getting his junk buffed in a wind tunnel. When recent polls in the polls in the UK indicate that 80% of the population is tired of political correctness, you have a real problem, not a generation gap.
When people complain about PC, they mean the sort that causes valid or even scientific discussion from even taking place because some hypersensitive miseryshit somewhere might be offended.
It's the sort of PC that chastises a kid in a Halloween pirate costume for wearing an eye patch because it's offensive to the disabled. Oops, I mean differently-abled! Sorry! Don't sue me for causing emotional distress, please! It's curious they never seem to ask an actual other-abled person. No, wait, "other" sounds exclusionary doesn't it? Argh! The low seas of PC be treacherous, me mateys!
Political correctness also seems to be covering hypersensitivity to safety, so you have it applied to cases where trapeze artists are required to wear hard hats or the Army is told to make their training courses safer to the point of, well, pointlessness. That seems odd to me, but the street finds its own uses for words, much like hacker is used in place of cracker by the general population. Language evolves- deal with it.
I went to the page for my alma mater. I wonder, were people this stupid when I was there? A lot of stupid crap, but at the same time, I can't stop reading. It's like a window into the mind of a dumb college kid.
But... This actually strikes me as really bad. I hope their robots.txt is such that Google is not indexing them. I saw a lot of people trash-talking folks by name. I wouldn't want to be applying for a job, or say, entering a career in politics, and have a Google hit for my name saying "she's such a dirty slut", or "omg i hrd he his penis is {x} inches". What I saw ranged from slanderous to highly personal, and these college kids probably aren't thinking of the consequences of what they write.
is there a digital urinal as well? I need to take a piss...
Oh no, kids are making fun of you. Jeez, get over it, teachers have had to deal with this kind of crap forever. Why seek it out? Just don't read it or pay attention to it.
The first one is obviously the best choice. I'd much rather have to deal with being slandered than have whistleblowers stifled. Hell, you get used to being slandered way early on in life, that's practically what elementary and high school are anyway. It's just now the teachers are taking exception to when it's done to them and not the kids.
When I read the title, I envisioned an actual whiteboard on the wall of a bathroom stall that allowed people to write on it. I figured the problems were people using real sharpies on it.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Aw boo hoo. It is not at all about "forcing" any kind of "restrictions" on your speech. But if you are rude and offensive, you shouldn't be at all surprised that you get called for being a rude ignorant twat. What exactly is the problem with that? You want to be able to say whatever you like, but others are not allowed to comment on that speech? If you talk like a cunt, people will call you a cunt, so cry me a river.
The worlds not PC, so they can get as up tight as they want about people writing what they feel but in the end they have to grow up and realize that the world isn't Politically Correct.
Did anyone else get this error?
ASSERT: *** Search: _installLocation: engine has no file!
Stack Trace:
0:ENSURE_WARN(false,_installLocation: engine has no file!,2147500037)
1:()
2:()
3:()
4:epsGetAttr([object Object],alias)
5:()
6:SRCH_SVC_getEngineByAlias(CollegeACB.com)
7:getEngineByAlias(CollegeACB.com)
8:getShortcutOrURI(CollegeACB.com,[object Object])
9:([object KeyboardEvent])
10:anonymous(textentered,[object KeyboardEvent])
11:fireEvent(textentered,[object KeyboardEvent])
12:onTextEntered()
13:handleEnter(false)
14:onKeyPress([object KeyboardEvent])
15:onxblkeypress([object KeyboardEvent])
Looking over the posts for my school at CollegeACB, they're all either spam or moronic chest-thumping about whose fraternity is better and which sorority is hotter. Why does this not surprise me?
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
From the summary i was hoping for a board full of life-ruining gossip and insults to get some Schadenfreude out of it. But noooooooooo, its just full of 'Sorority Rankings' and 'Frat Power Ranking' threads. Also theres the occasional, 'hottest people of greek life' thread. But in reality i suppose i shouldn't be surprised that its a community of greeks, i should have picked that up from the 'worst of junior high' part of the summary
Owner Peter Frank, a sophomore at Wesleyan University... runs ACB out of his dorm room. The 19-year-old English major... "I'm untouchable," he says.
You don't sound untouchable Pete, you just sound stupid. Especially after letting time.com publish your full name, picture, the city you live in, AND the school you attend. I am thinking that the next year is going to be very educational for you once your site slanders a couple of people to the point that they lose control and decide to take a trip to Middletown with your picture in hand.
Did anyone else read the title and think someone put a big electronic wall in the bathroom that can be written on like a tablet pc?
So the supposed big gossip site Juicy Campus folded in February after existing for a whole year and a half. CollegeACB is some site run by an English Major out of his dorm room. If you actually GO to the site, you'll see a lot of old, outdated posts mostly people asking for gossip and very few actually providing gossip. So this is supposed to be the big problem Colleges are worried about?
This is just another lazy journalist creating a story out of nothing.
AccountKiller
Libby Hoeler agrees.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
please check out the site we just launched Social Topics and let us know what you think. We try to build a more sustainable place for students to posts there thoughts. Thanks
Because of course, everyone takes anonymous garbage seriously.
Damage to a man's reputation doesn't require that everyone believe libelous garbage.
The damage is done when a single person in a position of authority -- your spouse, your boss, your commanding officer -- believes the libel.
-kgj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Squinting_Windows
A few students at top-tier liberal arts school I graduated from created an anonymous board for the school during my third year there. The site (and its copycats) didn't become a very big social factor when I was there, but they still exist and I think they're getting more popular. Based on the Wikipedia summary above of the novel, I'd agree with the comparison.
The school's nerds take the problem in their own hands and...persuade...the server to stop serving requests. That's what we've been doing. Gossip is healthy, but it needs the moderation mechanism of not being anonymous.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
That's impossible since Soulskill is still a virgin.
Seriously, if you're life is impacted so severely by an anonymous post on a college gossip site then something is wrong with your life. People debate the validity of Wikipedia posts, but trust a gossip site?
Honestly, I think this is a symptom of a lack of integrity. Parents aren't teaching their kids to have integrity any more. If you have integrity you don't fall apart when some one gossips about you. You also don't gossip about others, or put much importance in other people who gossip.
It is more important to be popular than to have integrity, and that is a shame.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
4chan for Harvard?
So I hurd ur thesis iz on mudkips?
I thought I would go to the site and find things like...
Don't beam me up Scottie, I'm on the sh
One strategy would be to flood such sites with scripts that make salacious stories and insert random names and hacked student lists if available. Flood the sites with everyone's name. That is the most direct way to finally convince the low-hanging fruit that the sites have no credibility.
You cannot possibly expect me to believe that "politeness" is natural and wonderful and "PC" is artificial and icky. Here's a news flash: while the two terms don't necessarily mean the same thing, they're both systems of rules meant to help people get along with each other. And they were both invented and codified by people. One is no less "invented" than the other.
Show me someone complaining about "hypersensitivity to safety", and I'll show you someone who's not exposed to much risk in his daily life.
PC is a fucking bludgeon used by the left to beat down people who disagree with them, and politeness is a dainty instrument used by the right to deny disfavored groups things like equal access to housing. Yeah, I can see how horrible political correctness is.