JuicyCampus doesn't deserve legal protection

By: Rachel Horn

Posted: 11/25/08

Infamous gossip Web site JuicyCampus.com is not merely a challenge to free speech; it is a manipulation of one of our country's foundational privileges to provide a venue in which individuals are aided to abuse others freely.

The original premise of JuicyCampus, site creator Matt Ivester told the Justice, is to be a place where students can post their opinions on their respective campus' day-to-day events-topics like quirky professors, great lectures or upcoming weekend events.

If you've been on the site, however, then you know that few of the posts, if any, follow these lines. The site has become a sounding board for students to post intimate information about and gossipy denigration of other students. No topics are off limits. How does Ivester explain the tone his site has assumed?

"The site has changed over time," Ivester says. "The content is entirely user-generated, created by students, for students, in the manner they deem appropriate, without an administrator or a governing body censoring them."

So what do we do about it? How can the average student fight back against potentially defamatory postings on the site, which guarantees anonymity for all its posters?

Many students cite the First Amendment as the crux of the JuicyCampus problem. It seems impossible to remove information from the page or curb its use without also limiting our free speech.

I would like to argue, however, that employing the First Amendment for this purpose is a misunderstanding of the intent and license of freedom of speech. Instead, it is an abuse of the privilege of citizenship.

Ivester maintains that the site isn't being used improperly and that no court has found anything on JuicyCampus to be defamatory to date. JuicyCampus removes some posts, but at its sole discretion. Its administrators won't remove a post based solely on the fact that it is incorrect, and any user wishing to have a post removed against the will of the site editors needs a court order.

Ivester explains that it isn't up to JuicyCampus to decide what's defamatory because the site editors have no way of knowing. The only items removed are spam, posts that provide specific contact information and illegal hate speech.

However, users are allowed to submit unproven information, which, in many cases, is hateful, even if not aimed at race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. It's hard to ignore the defamatory tone of postings like "xxx has a fat ass and should be removed [from the list of hottest girls], and xxx and xxx are too dirty to be on here."

Using JuicyCampus is not an exercise of freedom of speech; it is a shield that ignoble and immoral people use to avoid being criticized while pointing petty daggers at others. There is no confidence in this.

Freedom of speech is a personal liberty and should be used to express personal opinions. Were the site blocked from our campus servers by school officials, Ivester's right to express himself freely on his site would not be diminished.

Ivester himself admitted in his interview that owning the site does nothing to support his personal First Amendment rights because he doesn't post there. Students using it to voice their opinions would still be free to speak their minds or start their own personal pages. Ivester, therefore, is not providing a conduit for free speech, nor is he heroically defending it. He's providing a hiding place for people too cowardly to exercise this right and accept the potential consequences.

As designed by our forefathers, freedom of speech serves four specific functions: to create a more adaptable and stable community, to assure individual self-fulfillment, to promote tolerance and to create a more robust and interesting community. JuicyCampus does none of those things. It is a sad irony that this right is being turned into a weapon of emotional violence and a tool for those of limited articulation.

That said, JuicyCampus is not the only site of this kind, according to Ivester. "JuicyCampus is in good company," he says. "It's not like JuicyCampus is some renegade site out there that refuses to delete posts, and we're such jerks. Google has the exact same policy for its search engine."

Ivester also doesn't feel that the detrimental effects of his creation are far-reaching. He points out that college students should be mature enough to realize that what they are reading is unsubstantiated gossip and should not be taken at face value. No responsible employer would use these posts to make calls about potential hires, he argues.

In fact, Ivester actually views the discomfort that ensues from certain posts as positive. He encourages users not to pursue legal action against posters of incorrect, rude or destructive information; instead, he advises users "to combat bad posts with good posts. Everyone has an equal voice on JuicyCampus."

The road to maturity, and to becoming an educated, responsible citizen, is marked by the struggle to temper impulse with circumstance. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that "the first thing to note in any sensible discussion of freedom of speech is that it will have to be limited. Every society places some limits on the exercise of speech because speech always takes place within a context of competing values."

In this case, the values of privacy, honesty and kindness successfully compete with the unadulterated lies and fudging on JuicyCampus. People spend lifetimes learning to balance natural inclinations toward social evils like gossip with the knowledge that these evils detract from the comfort of others and actually take away from some of the pride we can take in ourselves.

We're living in a society that is moving forward in ways that were unimaginable only a decade ago. That momentum to change is limited only as far as the circle of our trust and confidence extends. Cases like this, however, make that circle smaller.