RIP Juicy Campus

For college students, the recession hasn’t gone unnoticed – but it probably hit home for many of us with the rather unceremonious Feb. 5 shutdown of JuicyCampus.com, an online collegiate gossip forum.

Announcing the closing, Matt Ivester, Juicy Campus founder and CEO, claimed that declining ad revenue and venture capital funding made the site financially unsustainable.

For many, Juicy Campus represented the demise of civility, and I tended to agree. On the rare occasions that I visited the site, I read through various threads declaring Delta Zeta girls “THE BEST!! OMG!”

When not ranking various greek houses, posters found time to rant about female students’ sex lives and the irrefutable fact that so-and-so was a slut. Of course, no online forum is complete without a good deal of homophobia and racism thrown in. Who knew that IU was home to such filth?

Actually, given the users’ guaranteed anonymity, I shouldn’t have been totally surprised at the vitriol heaped on fellow students. The site didn’t ask for a poster’s name or e-mail address and even provided tips on “cloaking” one’s IP address.

To make matters worse, as with many things these days, the law has not been in step with the latest technology. The most relevant piece of legislation regarding online forums, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, dates back to 1996. Here, for the purpose of law enforcement, a distinction was made between publishers and Internet providers.

Since Juicy Campus merely provided a forum for online users to publish statements about one other, it was not deemed responsible for the content published. Privacy expert Daniel Solove said this expansive interpretation of Section 230 eliminated the incentive to foster a balance between speech and privacy.

Defenders of the site have long argued that Juicy Campus was just a natural progression on the Web 2.0 continuum. Thanks to other tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, college students are thought to have become accustomed to the blurring of the private and public divide.

Expectations of privacy in such an interconnected atmosphere are unreasonable and impossible to guarantee. The problem with this argument is that unlike Facebook, gossip forums like Juicy Campus really lack the control of college students over what is said about them.

A few colleges did make attempts to limit the influence of Juicy Campus. In January 2008, Pepperdine University’s student government passed a resolution calling on administrators to block the site from the campus network.

A few months later, Tennessee State University banned the site from its servers as well. But these efforts were few and far between because no academic institution wanted to appear as impeding “free speech.”

Perhaps the Constitution does protect individuals from making derogatory comments about an ethnic group or a fellow student. But we’re still left contemplating the state of civility and lack of respect for others.

Now that Juicy Campus has financially collapsed, maybe the biggest lesson in all of this is that it doesn’t pay to be mean.