College Cyberbullying?

Free speech is one of the core democratic values on which America prides itself, and thanks to the internet, more and more people are finding it easier than ever to make their own voices heard. But when happens when free speech crosses the line? These days, we hear many stories about “cyberbullying”: teens being harassed by peers over the internet, and the equivalent for college students also exists in the form of college gossip websites. The “College Anonymous Confession Board” or CollegeACB provides school-specific anonymous discussion boards where students can post comments or topics to their peers. More often than not, these topics are mean and degrading: “Hottest Freshman Girls,” and “greek b****es” are some of the tamer ones I came across. Brown does not have a CollegeACB board, but I searched around the boards of different schools that some of my friends attend and was shocked at the level of horrible things that people had written. A lot of posts are simply titled with a person’s name—as in “Joe Schmo- a**hole?”—and then followed with a slew of comments bashing that person. One thread I found on Yale’s board had 37 comments, all discussing how much the posters hated a particular girl. In my opinion, college gossip websites like this are a brand of cyberbullying and are likely more hurtful than actual, face-to-face insults. Anonymity and being “safe” behind a computer makes people feel liberated to be meaner because no one will ever know it was them, which is why cyberbullying is so hurtful. My freshman year at Vassar before I transferred to Brown, I had a friend who was a subject of discussion on a gossip website (“boredatvassar.com", which has since been disabled by Vassar: read about it here.) People on the website had insulted her looks and her personality, calling her everything from easy to a know-it-all. She tried her best to laugh at the comments and make it seem like she thought it was ridiculous instead of hurtful, but it was clear that the comments really hurt her. Free speech is all well and good but the anonymity makes it difficult to tell where the line is drawn between free speech and harassment; face-to-face, someone can be accused of verbal abuse, but on the internet the lines become blurred and relative anonymity makes it difficult to prevent or punish. As CBS new’s Larry Magid says in an article about how to handle cyberbullying, “We need to be careful to draw the line between harmful harassment and constitutionally protected speech. Just as in the fight against terrorism, those lines can easily be blurred.”

-Miranda