 "Photo: David Givler and Ryan Littman-Quinn")
Despite gloomy weather reports, April 12 brought with it a clear sky and the crisp aroma of spring. Boys did their best to make their game of catch look effortless in front of the pretty girls walking around campus. All of Boston College seemed to be outside. But at some point, someone apparently took a break from the festivities and made his voice heard on Juicycampus.com with a quick response to the pithy query of "Biggest Slut?"
In the age of Amazon, Google, MySpace, and Facebook, entrepreneurs eager to find - or create - a profitable niche are creating hundreds of Web sites full of pointless gimmicks. Sometimes they show up in a banner ad or an e-mail (telling readers that if they only sign up for some Web site they will find out who has a crush on them and who decided the most logical course of action would be to solicit him through a Web site); most often they pass silently by. But the rapidly growing collegiate gossip site Juicycampus.com apparently found a vile niche in the dark recesses of the psyche.
Juicycampus.com was created last fall by Matt Ivester, a recent graduate of Duke University. When the site opened to select schools in the fall, user postings, in a process that would quickly repeat itself at campuses across the nation, almost instantly became vicious, libelous, racist, and homophobic - generally unpleasant. Hoping that some sort of school pride would sway him (and perhaps trying to minimize the embarrassment of having matriculated the creator of such an infamous Web site), Duke soon contacted Ivester and, informing him of the emotional stress he was causing at his alma mater, asked him to moderate the site. Ivester, who presumably had always understood exactly what kind of posts his site would encourage, declined and even reveled in his creation's growing notoriety. It began to add other schools soon thereafter, and now every campus seems to have its own horror stories.
The site's interface is quite primitive - in reality it seems little more than a large message board. Its brilliance lies in its exploitation of cyber laws on libel and Internet anonymity. In libel law there is a distinction between distributor and publisher - the distinction between a store that sells the libel and the authors who published it (if there were libelous material in The Heights, for example, The Heights would be the publisher and Corcoran Commons merely a distributor). Victims can sue only publishers for libel; distributors generally are exempt from legal repercussions.
In 1996, Congress clarified libel laws for the Internet era with the Communications Decency Act, in which section 230 made clear that Internet service providers are always distributors and never publishers. The section also covers Web sites: Amazon.com, for instance, cannot be sued for having libelous feedback or reviews on its Web site; only the actual authors of those comments can. Dale Herbeck, professor in the communication department who teaches a class called Cyberlaw, emphasized the necessity of such a clause; without it, a distributor like Boston College would have to read all e-mails that users sent for potentially libelous material. "Big Brother would have to watch," Herbeck says. Unfortunately, Herbeck noted that within communications many researchers find a tendency for every loophole to be taken advantage of, and that is precisely what Juicy Campus has done.
"Juicy Campus exploits the position," Herbeck says. "They don't say 'Please be responsible on our site.' They tell you to be as irresponsible as you like."
The site claims to make no records of which users have posted what, trying to separate user IP addresses from accompanying posts. On a video from the site's rather campy blog, a buxom, bewigged woman tells users that "Juicy Campus is anonymous in a similar way that it would be anonymous if you wrote an anonymous letter to a newspaper. You don't sign your name and you don't provide your contact information, so people at the newspaper couldn't find out your name unless the police were involved." As such, when anyone tries to find out the names of the libel publishers from their distributor, Juicy Campus, the creators can hold up their hands and plead ignorance.
Many, including New Jersey's attorney general, have tried to take on the site nonetheless, but Herbeck thinks the efforts will be bootless. "Legally [Juicy Campus's] position is very strong," Herbeck says. "It's possible states will try novel legal tactics, but I doubt it will work. Part of the price of having open access is that we all have open access."
Some campuses have resorted to internal measures - Pepperdine's student government recommended such a step to alleviate the emotional distress of students, and Yale apparently contacted a lawyer about legal steps. At BC, no such steps have been taken, though Interim Dean of Student Development Paul Chebator says that administrators have scheduled a meeting in the coming weeks to discuss the site. The school has received a number of complaints from students in the Undergraduate Government of BC, concerned faculty members, and residential life staff. Though Chebator says the meeting was simply to discuss options and no decisions had been made, he says that "it concerns me that our network is being used to post these kinds of messages."
Students, without whom the Web site would not persist, have quite disparate reactions. Every media story about the site features poignant leads about students from any given school who have become so distressed that they left school or dropped out of a class or lost friends because of it (two upperclassmen initially willing to be quoted in this article hesitated when they thought they'd be bashed on the site).
Elizabeth Spang, A&S '08, only found out about the site recently but was quite troubled by it. "I was shocked," she says of her first visit.
"I'd read things and I'd say 'I know him and him and her and him, and this stuff just isn't true.' It's unfair to talk about people behind their back, and now you can do it in a public forum."
Some are less troubled by the site and dismiss it as puerile and harmless (if vulgar and occasionally racist) nonsense. Kyle McCulloch, A&S '08, noted that a friend, "once put me on there for being gay. And I am." He says that he could not care less about what is written on the site.
"Nothing on there is credible and no one should take it seriously. It's all written by spiteful people or as a joke," he says.
Of course, the site could not exist without some people who actually enjoy the content, even if few admit getting such a frisson out of the stuff. Michael Fabbri, A&S '08, who has also been mentioned on the site, says that "any publicity is good publicity."
"I get some entertainment out of it," he says. "I think people take it too seriously. Nothing on there is even true, so why would anyone bother to believe it?"
Judith Vessey, a professor in the Connell School of Nursing, has studied bullying and cyber bullying extensively. She says that, by definition, three circumstances must occur for an incident to be classified as bullying: There must be a power differential between the two parties, there must be repetition, and there must be intent to harm.
"I think there's potential for Juicy Campus to do real harm," she says, mentioning recent violence on college campuses like last April's Virginia Tech shooting.
While some of the posts attack football players or hockey stars, people who are envied and in some ways seem invincible in college's social hierarchy, more danger could occur with attacks on more defenseless individuals. "There's a difference between attacking someone 'above you' and attacking someone truly vulnerable," she says.
All the same, the site may be here to stay. One should not paint an overly dire portrait of the thing - like McCulloch and Fabbri noted, even to the least discerning eye it appears that the significant majority of posts are bald fabrications, perverse jokes on friends, or people trolling to find out their own reputation.
It is troublesome that such vicious bullying now knows no bounds. Now the strong and weak, nerd and jock alike can vent their anger in a forum for all to see, with almost no repercussions. But then again, even an outright campus ban could hardly stem the flow of gossip from jealous human beings. Juicy Campus may utilize greater technology, but it's a trend as old as time (or at least high school).
"Juicy Campus," Vessey says, "is not much more than an advanced slam book."
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