“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” — William Shakespeare
The day JuicyCampus shuttered, the website (juicycampus.com) began redirecting to College ACB (Anonymous Confession Board). With the same promise of anonymity, College ACB now provides us with the same gems JuicyCampus used to. Select any of the colleges in the drop bar, and you’ll find plenty of uncensored and unpleasant expression.
A March 7 article in the LA Times profiles the new site (which, in the past month has jumped from 80,000 to 450,000 visitors). In the article, Peter Frank, the freshman who created the new site makes vague promises about keeping College ACB cleaner. Frank is quoted, saying:
I’m not sure if JuicyCampus ever deleted posts…. They basically let anything go. It really became a polarizing figure of free speech…. We certainly don’t let anything go…. You’ll see a much cleaner image on our site. . . . . There’s more hateful speech than we’d like to see…. I might have hurt our image in the short term.
We’ll be keeping tabs on how this plays out: how College ACB will try to be a platform for anonymous, free exchange, and how they will try to define hateful speech that could harm their image.