And I thought I went to a smart school: CollegeACB (All Contemptible Bullshit)

On a day to day basis I often come across things that people do that shock and disgust me. It’s not that I’m shocked that people would stoop to such levels, as I know human depravity is infinite. The more shocking thing is that it is coming from my peers who I thought I could hold to a higher level going to an institution such as Tufts. Obviously I was wrong. Here marks the first part of an ongoing series I am starting entitled “And I thought I went to a smart school”. In this series I hope to express my incredulousness towards some of the things I see on campus by people that I expected better of on a regular basis. Try to enjoy it if you can, because all it brings me is frustration…

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There is a disease that has somehow managed to infect many campuses across the country. It snuck in when people weren’t looking, and has latched itself to the underbelly of the universities. Unfortunately, there is no panacea for it as it has much legal immunity. It just chugs along, damaging feels, mental states, reputations of its victims, and the souls of the people that use it. This terrible parasite is CollegeACB.

CollegeACB or College Anonymous Confession Board is a web space where anyone may go online and write anything they would like about anything completely confidentially. While this does not sound like such a big deal on the surface, CollegeACB has become a haven for people to gossip, criticize and ridicule their peers with no threat of retaliation. Using first amendment rights as a shield. CollegeACB has become a place for people to be ostracized and made fun of, to a point where it can cause some serious issues.

CollegeACB was founded in 2008 by a couple students at Johns Hopkins University. Soon after its creation, it has expanded to over 500 colleges across the country and has since been renamed. It is considered by many to be the spiritual successor to an earlier online campus gossip website called Juicy Campus which recently went out of business. Juicy Campus was criticized frequently during its run for being out of control and overtly inflammatory. While its most ardent supporters still deny it, CollegeACB has fallen down to the same level if not worse.

I came across CollegeACB after hearing a couple people talking about it during RA training at the beginning of the year. Intrigued, I decided to go online and check it out. I was disgusted from the very start. Tufts’ page on College ACB is one of the most active out there. On the website, the first topic that I saw was “Tufts is So Gay” followed by “I heard … gives great lap dances” followed by “____ has Chlamydia” Upon reading into posts, things get from bad to worse, with people just flat out insulting others, naming names, making racial and homosexual slurs against specific people, and overall setting out to ruin other people’s reputations. Some posts would itemize women by asking people to describe their sexual encounters with people, and how easy it is to “get with” them. Other posts would simply name someone’s name and prompt a firing squad of insults against them. It was frankly a shit show of hate mixed with homophobia and sexual tension. Does this sound like the place for “deep and thoughtful discussion” that the current administrator of the site chalks it up to be?

There are so many issues with CollegeACB and so many things that just aren’t right to be up on the site; far too much to talk about here. It was just truly disappointing to me that my fellow students here at Tufts would go to such new lows, all cowardly hiding behind an anonymous moniker. I’m not the only one who has felt this way across the country, with many calls for administrators to ban CollegeACB on their campuses. Unfortunately, this gets into a whole clusterfrak of legal issues.

The first amendment grants universal freedom of speech. Under the amendment, websites like CollegeACB have been able to thrive. Additionally, Section230 of the US Communications Decency Act protects any website hosts from any liability for the content that users post to their site. Under these two protections, it is quite difficult to provide a legal challenge against places like CollegeACB. Despite these restrictions, there are some claims that can be made against the site. Private Institutions have the right to ban access to the site on their campuses, and many have done so already. For public institutions it is much more difficult.

I am a huge proponent of free speech. As Voltaire once said “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I feel that this holds true in most instances, and that censorship is overall a bad thing. I don’t feel though that the first amendment grants the right to slander, defame, and bully others. Cyber bullying has become a contemporary dilemma that has arisen with internet use. CollegeACB is a haven for cyber bullying, providing an opportunity for students to ridicule their peers to a point of mental collapse. With several suicides that have already happened nationally as a result of internet ridicule, do we really want CollegeACB to be the cause of the next death? CollegeACB does give you the chance to report posts that you feel are offensive, that are supposedly going to be removed. In preparing for this blog, I recently reported a post that seemed to go too far. Over a week has passed, and nothing has been done about it.

A common argument that people have made is that if you don’t like it, then you don’t have to navigate to the website and read it. I have also been asked why I have bothered to read any of it in the first place. Personally, I check it from time to time more as a precaution. I’m an RA so I just want to make sure none of my residents are talking about me. After a search, there was one indirect comment about me a while back saying that I had ample supplies of weed if anyone wanted some. I thought it was kind of funny, so I shrugged it off, but not every comment is so easy to ignore. With a campus community as small as Tufts, more often than not you will know the people that are getting talked about. If some of the comments that are made ever make it back to the people they were about, some real emotional damage could be done. Yes, they don’t have to read it, but that is not going to change the website from affecting the way other people think about them. Anything that can hurt people in such a way, and bring about such negative feelings has no place anywhere in general, let alone a prestigious learning institution whose mission stands in complete opposition.

I do have to admit, there have been times when I have felt a glimmer of hope from the posts of some people on the site. Occasionally someone will write something so incredibly ignorant or offensive that it prompts people to jump in and try to shut them down. There are also a couple non-derogatory threads relating to classes to take, and even advise for students that need it. Unfortunately, there is a lot more bad than good to be found.

In conclusion, what do I think should be done about it? I don’t think there is a need for administrations to go ahead and ban it. I think students should rather just wake up. Hiding your message behind the cover of CollegeACB is honestly a bit pathetic. If you really want to voice your opinion in such a way, voice it in a public setting, and see the response you get then. Students at Tufts and other institutions should just know better. You do not impress anyone. You’re in college now. Grow up. It’s as simple as that.

Update: I found this gem of a statement on CollegeACB in the midst of writing this post. “GREEDY JEWS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR COUNTRY'S SORRY ECONOMIC STATE AND THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN”