He said, She said: College ACB

Him: Tyler Roberts | Op/Ed Assistant Editor / Her: Eliza Dillard | Op/Ed Editor

College ACB is Entertaining, But Readers Beware

Tyler Roberts | Op/Ed Assistant Editor

If you knew you could say just about anything you wanted no matter how vulgar without being caught, would you? Or if you had the chance to read what people were saying about you, would you have the heart to look?

College Anonymous Confessions Board, more commonly know as College ACB, is an open forum where posts can be made anonymously. This allows its users to post anything about anyone without repercussion. College ACB gives users the chance to let others know how they really feel, and in many cases it isn’t pretty.

Most of the discussions revolve around individuals or groups of individuals. Some of the posts are along the lines of “who is the sexiest guy/girl on campus?” or “what is the hottest sorority?” Discussions in these groups can bolster confidence in those who are named. It also attracts the egotistical narcissists who search for their names and, in some cases, write about themselves. But College ACB discussions usually take a turn towards the ugly.

Still, College ACB has its humorous side. I particularly found the “Top halls of Hogwarts” to be quite entertaining. Other posts are satirical and sarcastic. I saw several of my friends’ names mentioned in several of the discussions for UNCW and just had to laugh at the thought of them extolling their own praises or bashing one another just for kicks.

The problem with College ACB isn’t that the discussion groups are offensive; on the contrary, that is what makes the site so much fun. The real problem I have with the site is that students take the comments posted way too seriously. No one is going to this site specifically to make hate posts. Most of the time, the comments posted are outrageously exaggerated to the point of the incredible.

People who post on this site are bored. They are sitting in class, in the dorms and in the library looking for a 10 minute escape from their work. Comments are made to provoke anger and forum discourse for laughs. Next time someone posts your name, don’t get too excited. It’s probably just another student with nothing better to do. Once you put it into perspective, it seems kind of silly to put so much stock into what people are posting behind the veil of College ACB.

My advice is this: don’t dish it if you can’t take it. In fact, don’t bother visiting the site if you don’t think you can stomach it. In many cases, the posts are completely pointless. Before I visited the site, I was blissfully unaware that so-and-so was considered to be the sexiest man at UNCW. So ask yourself, is reading College ACB, a site that could have damaging comments about me or my friends, really worth my time?

Maybe there is a lesson to learn from College ACB. Perhaps instead of spending our time posting caustic comments or being in constant worry about what might be said about us, we should be doing things that are not subject to scrutiny on College ACB. This omniscient, anonymous observer has no discretion and will name and shame anybody it deems contemptible. Still, people will be taunted and teased, but it is up to the users whether they laugh alongside, take the criticism to heart or choose to simply ignore the posts.

College ACB is supposed to provide entertainment. It is a chance for students to join in on salacious campus gossip without the shame of doing so. Be wary, though, this stuff is not for the light of heart.

 

College ACB: The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Ugly

Eliza Dillard | Op/Ed Editor

In theory, a website in which college students can post anonymously about problems, concerns and campus gossip seems pretty harmless. These websites, which claim to promote and encourage the idea of anonymous “freedom of speech” for college campuses, however, seem to be above students’ maturity level. Such websites turn into a free-for-all for students to anonymously start, for the most part, nasty discussion threads about crude topics or worst of all, their peers.

College Anonymous Confession Board (College ACB) became popular after a similar website, JuicyCampus.com, was shut down in Feb. 2009 because the site became more hateful and less “juicy.” These websites, meant for harmless gossip, have been abused by people anonymously posting hate threads singling out specific people or groups of people.

If you were to go to UNC Wilmington’s College ACB site on any given day, you could expect to find posts about so-and-so’s “boob job,” sororities bashing other sororities, fraternities bashing other fraternities, a list of “freshmen that drink alcohol and have sex,” hottest girls on campus, ugliest girls on campus, “poor Greeks” and so on. Only a handful of the discussions on this site are seemingly innocent, and even those somehow get taken down a disturbing path.

If utilized in a better fashion, I think that College ACB could be somewhat beneficial to our campus. Students could post about which classes and professors they would or would not recommend taking or ask questions such as which off-campus apartments are the best to live in, for example. It’s helpful getting students’ opinions on such topics, and College ACB allows an easy way to ask these questions. The problem is the immature people who provide less than helpful responses and think they can say whatever they want to anyone they want because they are on an anonymous site.

At the rate that CollegeACB.com is going now, I expect it will meet a similar fate as that of JuicyCampus.com, as it should. No website should cause students to fear whether or not their name will be posted under “ugliest girls on campus” or some similar hateful thread. If students could act more maturely and focus less on the negative and more on the positive, the website could be a helpful tool for the Seahawk community. However, with the majority of site users hiding behind their computer screens and publicly humiliating other students, this seems like an impossible feat.