Yousuf Bakshi, a junior at
Harvard, recalled getting
in line at El Jefe’s Taqueria at 2am in Cambridge, Massachusetts to grab a
late-night snack after a recent night out. Bakshi, 20, could not help noticing
that nearly everyone ahead of him in line was on their phones, all scrolling
through the same app: Sidechat.
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“It’s an easy place to see all the jokes and gossip, and it
really helps foster a lot of talk of the town,” Bakshi said, comparing the app
to Lady Whistledown’s gossip column in the Netflix series “
Bridgerton”.
In recent months, Sidechat, a buzzy new app, where users log
in with university-affiliated email addresses and write anonymous posts that
are visible only within their school community, has racked up downloads at
universities including Harvard, Cornell, Tufts, and Columbia. Campus newspapers
have documented the app’s fast-paced growth. In March, The Cornell Daily Sun
wrote that “the app has quickly become a hallmark of Cornell social life.” In
April, The Harvard Crimson reported that Sidechat “is taking campus by storm”.
The premise is not new but is irresistible for many
students: an opportunity to chat about what’s happening on campus with peers,
without having their names attached to what they say. Posts go live without any
prior approval and are only removed later if a message is deemed to be in
violation of platform guidelines. While some students find the secrecy to be
harmless fun, others seem to be emboldened by the anonymity and, as is common
online, post caustic and hurtful comments. Now, some students, many already
jaded by past experiences with similar platforms, say they are souring on
Sidechat, but they are still signing on.
“It is fun to just post memes and relatable things without
having your identity revealed,” Bakshi said.
The founders of Sidechat have remained anonymous. A
representative for the company, who did not disclose their name, said the
founders would not comment for this article. The representative also declined
to answer questions sent by email, including how many schools it is currently
operating at. Nearly a dozen student ambassadors contacted for this article
declined to be interviewed or did not respond to requests for comment.
Gossip, inside jokes, and toxicity
For years, students have flocked to anonymous confessions
pages on Facebook and Instagram (Harvard Confessions or Tufts Secrets, for
example) where they can submit posts that are then approved and posted by a
moderator.
Formspring became popular in the early 2010s for allowing
users to post questions and answers without having to identify themselves. It
was quickly filled with
cyberbullies who would post threats and hurtful
comments aimed at other teenage users. The site shut down in 2013, when its
chief executive announced that the maintenance costs had become untenable.
It is fun to just post memes and relatable things without having your identity revealed,
Just last year, Yik Yak restarted after having shut down in
2017. The app had become overrun with hate speech and harassment, and some
universities even banned it from their Wi-Fi networks.
“Anonymous apps are notorious for rapidly rising and falling
in popularity,” said Ysabel Gerrard, a social media researcher at the
University of Sheffield. “They attract a user base far larger and faster than
their founders anticipate, leaving staff unprepared for the necessary scale of
content moderation.”
But the speed of growth of these platforms, and the
controversies around them, can be part of the appeal, she added. “It’s also often
the case that teens download new apps in the hopes they’ll be safer than those
preceding them,” she said.
Rabiya Ismail, 22, who was a student at Tufts, said she had
downloaded Sidechat after seeing another student promoting the app on her class
Facebook group. “It started off fun,” she said. “People were just going on to
make jokes about campus and post memes.”
But just a few weeks later, after seeing that the app had
become flooded with hateful posts, Ismail deleted it. “We’ve had a lot of
xenophobic and racist comments,” she said. “If a low-income student makes a
post complaining about wealth on campus, there will always be a comment saying,
‘Well, I’m sorry you’re poor.’ ”
She eventually redownloaded Sidechat because she didn’t want
to miss out on the positive aspects of campus life it promoted. “Recently,
Elizabeth Warren was randomly on our campus, and someone posted that she’s at
the campus center, which got people talking,” Ismail said.
Nicholas Gray, 20, a freshman at Cornell, said his biggest
complaint about the app was the way it’s moderated. Because the moderators can
be students, in his experience, a lot of the posts are “moderated in a
superficial manner,” he said.
Harvard, Columbia, and Tufts did not respond to requests for
comment, and representatives from Brown University and Cornell said the schools
had no affiliation with Sidechat.
“This is a third-party app with no involvement from the
university,” Brian Clark, a spokesperson for
Brown University, said. “The
dynamics of online communities are of course complex, particularly where
anonymity is part of the equation.”
Cookies for downloads
Students said that it felt as if the app had become popular
overnight. Kristin Merrilees, 20, a sophomore at
Barnard College in Manhattan,
which has a partnership with Columbia, said that one day, out of nowhere, she
saw that several peers had posted about it on their Instagram stories. She
noticed people setting up tables to promote the app on the quad, and an email
was sent out to her entire sorority, saying that the group could earn $3 from
Sidechat for every member that downloaded it.
The email, which was reviewed by
The New York Times,
described the app to would-be promoters as “basically like a Columbia-only Yik
Yak.”
The suggestion of a school-specific experience appears to be
central to Sidechat’s marketing pitch: Student ambassadors are enlisted to give
the app campus credibility; separate Instagram accounts market the app with
inside jokes unique to each university; even the app interface differs from
user to user, reflecting the school colors of the student who is accessing it.
TyKerius Monford, a freshman at Brown, worked as an
ambassador for Sidechat. Monford, 19, said he learned of the opportunity when a
president of a club he was a member of mentioned that she was working with
Sidechat and that they were looking for student contractors to help get it off
the ground.
“Brown has a pretty big startup culture, and I wanted to be
involved in that way,” he said. Monford helped spread the word about the app on
social media, and he made several posts on Sidechat to populate the feed, he
said.
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