A new Web site is sweeping across major U.S. campuses: JuicyCampus.com. The mantra emblazoned on the header sums up the founding principles: "Always Anonymous...Always Juicy..."
The gossip site, which currently has pages for about 75 universities, including SUNY Buffalo, allows students to post any messages about anything, without attaching a name to the post. The site takes special precautions to ensure anonymity, going as far as not associating IP addresses with specific posts - unlike other social networking sites.
Many of the posts on the site are innocuous gossip related to Greek life, but others get far more vicious - posts like "Top 10 Freshmen Sluts" and "Jew Infestation" frequently pop up on the site, and individuals are often targeted by name for attacks.
JuicyCampus, under U.S. law, has no responsibility for material that users post on the site. But the site is responsible in that it is set up in such a way to deliberately facilitate anonymous slander and defamation. Individuals often have their reputations destroyed at the hands of anonymous attackers.
At many universities across the country, student-newspaper editorials and student governments have lobbied administrations to block the site. While we at The Lamron don't advocate such a position (we've been know to run edgy material in the past, sometimes to the chagrin of certain students) we do maintain that singling individuals out for base, cowardly attacks on their character, which would never occur if the individuals making the attacks were required to expose themselves, absolutely crosses the line of everything the higher-education sphere stands for and is meant to facilitate. JuicyCampus doesn't belong at Geneseo, or anywhere.
Our recommendation is simple: don't view the site. There's not currently a Geneseo page, and we can keep it that way. If enough students band together to combat this repulsive avenue for propagating obvious slander (and many have: the "Ban JuicyCampus Facebook group boasts nearly 900 members), the site will die.