Juicy Off Campus

Interesting.

Tennessee State University has blocked a student gossip Web site from its network in a move the site's creators claim is a violation of students' First Amendment rights.

The site, JuicyCampus.com, has invoked ire from college administrators across the country for its anonymous, often highly personal posts about students, although few schools have taken the steps to block access to the site on their campus.

TSU is the first public university in the country to block the site from its network, the Web site’s owner claimed in a press release today, calling it a decision “to censor the speech of its own students.”

For those of you not up to speed on what those crazy kids are doing these days, JuicyCampus is a website started last year by a Duke grad that allows anyone to anonymously post messages about anyone else on a college campus. They have networks for about 60 or so colleges, and all I.P. addresses on the site are cloaked so that the messages can't be traced. The effect of the anonymity is that anyone with a grudge can post disgusting lies about innocent people, with no way to respond or to clear it up.

One thing that JuicyCampus is not is a "gossip site." Folks, Perez Hilton is a gossip site. JuicyCampus is the online equivalent of graffiti on a sketchy bathroom wall. It's every problem with the Internet condensed into one website.

It blew up at Cornell during my senior year. Nothing bad was ever said about me (please, I was nowhere near that popular), but several awful, hurtful, untrue messages were posted about girls in my sorority and in other sororities (it seemed that women in the Greek system were subject to the largest amount of vitriol). No need to go into details, but it left all of us fearful.

All that being said, I'm not sure if what TSU is doing is the right way to go about it. The site owners' claims that the blocking of JuicyCampus is a violation of students' First Amendment rights has no legal basis; colleges routinely block certain websites from their networks, such as porn or music downloading services. During my sophomore year the students essentially had a game of Whack-A-Mole going with the administration involving the illegal music-sharing DC++ hubs that kept being created on the network. Good (nerdy) times.

However, by trying to shut it down this way, TSU risks calling more attention to JuicyCampus. I had known about JuicyCampus but didn't realize how big of a deal it was until I read an editorial in the Cornell paper about how we shouldn't use it. Naturally, it piqued my curiosity, and I doubt I was the only one. How many more people will now check out JuicyCampus now that TSU has announced their plans? Besides, plenty of TSU students live or work off-campus, so simply blocking JuicyCampus from the network won't stop students from accessing it from somewhere else, out of the oversight of school administrators.

Ultimately, I don't know what the correct answer is. Ideally we could say, "Just ignore it and it'll go away." The product can't survive in the market if there's no demand. But that would require an incredible amount of maturity and discipline on everyone's parts.

Hell, I hope that I don't inadvertently drive anyone else to check it out simply by writing about it.