University gossip site shuttered after salacious comments, classist remarks

Library Whispers had 1,000 comments in its first week.

A student-run Cambridge University website meant to be an innocent exchange between frequenters to the school’s library devolved into a “forum of hate” brimming with disparaging comments, forcing Cambridge students to pull the plug.

Library Whispers, a Twitter-style blog inviting anonymous comments about campus goings on, was shut down this week after the site was flooded with the “worst sort of bullying and abusive messages,” Oliver Rees, a Library Whispers cofounder, wrote in a message to the blog’s readers.

The furor over the Britain-based Library Whispers was similar to controversy caused by an American college gossip Juicy Campus, which shut down in February 2009 after 18 months of operation.…Read More

Student pushes back against college gossip site

CollegeACB.com gets about 20 million monthly page views.

Hurling online insults is easy when you’re anonymous. Putting a name to that invective changes everything—and that’s what University of Southern California (USC) freshman Haley Winters is banking on.

Winters created an online petition March 21 asking college students to pledge to use their names in posts on the website CollegeACB.com, described by its creator as an “anonymous confession board” with more than 20 million monthly page views.

The petition asks students to sign their names and pledge to take “the anonymous out of CollegeACB.”…Read More

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