Real Life Gossip Girl at College Campus

Apparently, there’s a real life Gossip Girl – or two – at a campus gossip site. The site, juicycampus.com (warning: the site is painfully slow), reportedly features anonymous reports about real life students. The site mentions students by name in threads about popularity, weight and sexual encounters. Even uglier topics include anti-Semitism and homophobia – names are named.

It’s an opportunity, as you might imagine, for some pretty tough feelings.

Of course, the site’s founder, Matt Ivester, a Duke University grad (I’m sure that the Blue Devils are so proud), believes that the site has the opportunity to be positive. He told CNN, “College students are clever and fun-loving, and we wanted to create a place where they could share their stories.”

To that end, it is an open forum where anonymity is encouraged – the header claims “100% anonymous.” Many who are opposed to JuicyCampus claim that the site needs to be moderated in order to mitigate some of the nastiness. Ivester apparently has no such interest, touting “[i]t is not possible for anyone to use this website to find out who you are or where you are located” and even encouraging users by stating: “If you are particularly concerned about hiding your ip address, there are several services that offer free ip-cloaking. Just do a quick search on Google and find one you like…”

Nice, huh?

The site is causing so much commotion that at least one student government has voted to ban it: Pepperdine. Despite the vote, Pepperdine has not yet banned the site.

And, at least one poster has already used the site to “anonymously” threaten a shooting at Loyola-Marymount. An arrest was made in that instance.

My own campus isn’t listed, so I borrowed the alma mater of a friend: Penn State University. What’s there? Titles like “Red Headed Dance Team Sl*t” and “Ambiguous guys.” Most were just nasty and filled with spelling errors. I’m afraid that I don’t quite get the appeal.

What do you think? Harmless fun? Or in poor taste? Ban-worthy? Is a real life Gossip Girl too much?