Universities Weblog

Dan Belzer and Duke University's independent student news paper, The Chronicle, both recently talked about the new gossip site that has Duke University in a tizzy. The site is Juicy Campus, and it has attracted attention far and wide - including a short comment from U.S. News & World Reports that calls it "repulsive, offensive, and disgusting…"

The site looks to have started on about October 22, judging from postings there. Some 22 pages of anonymous postings exist at the site. And therein lies the problems. The postings are all completely anonymous and utterly unmoderated.

Want to write about other people's real or imagined sexual proclivities and orientations? Feel free. Use their actual names if you like. Don't worry too much about your language. Heck, if you can't find anything salacious enough to make for good reading, just invent stories about your roommate or ex-girlfriend. After you post it you can change your name on the forum and reply to your own posting to confirm the truth of the lie you invented. You get the idea…

The owner of the site is a Duke graduate named Matt Ivester, according to the Chronicle. They say he was once president of a fraternity on campus.

Belzer's reaction to the site is, I suspect, typical:

On the one hand, I was shocked and horrified by the comments I was reading. On the other, I was mesmerized. One look and I was unknowingly sucked into an addiction. I wanted more. More names, more dirt, more hate. I knew it was wrong, and I couldn't morally justify adding to the hateful insanity, but I also couldn't and can't stop reading.

In an editorial the day after Belzer's column, The Chronicle calls the site "reprehensible." The editorial says that while the paper's editorial board believes in free speech, it doesn't think that such anonymous comments qualify as free speech. I would agree. Many American's seem to miss the fact that no right is absolute; at the point in time when my rights come into conflict with someone else's rights, law seems to me to require compromise. The First Amendment was intended to guarantee the free exchange of ideas, not to serve as a shield for gossips and liars.

I suspect that Ivester's site gets a lot of traffic and generates a lot of advertising revenue for him. I can see lots of 19-year-old girls checking the boards daily to see if anyone's written anything about them that their mother might see. And when Duke's moms and dads find the site, its traffic will probably increase even more.

U.S. News says that hackers have brought the site down at least once. Those sorts of attacks on the site will probably continue.

Unfortunately for Duke and the rest of the world, Belzer's conclusion is probably correct: "Knowing this school's love affair with gossip, status and elitist superiority, I don't foresee this site dying any time soon."

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