I wanted to believe drama and gossip would cease once I left high school, but I was naive for thinking this would be the case.
If you’ve heard of College Anonymous Message Board — also known as College ACB — you know it’s a website where students can discuss rumors, rants and gossip about other students and faculty on campus. College ACB resembles the failed JuicyCampus Website, but has avoided the same route through a greater amount of user regulation. However, College ACB has come under controversy due to the similarities of its predecessor JuicyCampus, as users’ posts tend to be slanderous.
Most Cal State Long Beach College ACB posts deal with our school’s Greek system. The most talked about posts include which fraternity throws the best parties, which sorority is the hottest and which fraternity has the creepiest members. The comments on these posts are filled with vulgar language, and not to mention ridiculous spelling and grammatical errors.
While the murdering of the English language and the post’s content can be humorous at times, most of the material isn’t meant to make the reader laugh. Instead, it’s an avenue for people to spew their hatred toward others.
Being part of the Greek community myself, I know trash talking is inevitable between houses. However, the trash talking that should be staying within house is now being published on the Internet for everyone to see.
A recent controversial post was a seven-page newspaper called the CSULB Greekly, which was created by harsh critics of the CSULB Greek community. The Greekly had been delivered in print form to many of the Greek houses before being posted to College ACB. It was filled with slanderous news stories about different fraternities, sororities and even faculty. The Greekly went as far to make up quotes for real people, a possible case of libel and public defamation. The Greekly has since been removed from College ACB, but has left a bad taste in the mouths of those it victimized.
The reason why these hate-filled posts — like the Greekly — are so disgusting is the dark shadow they hang over our campus’ image. College ACB is a public site where prospective students, alumni, parents and potential donors can see what we are discussing. Their image of us will stimulate thoughts of how disconnected we are as a campus.
I really hope the culprits behind the CSULB Greekly and other hurtful posts at least feel ashamed of their immaturity. While this is a difficult task because of College ACB and its anonymity making an example of those hate-filled
liars can turn this fiasco around.
I also believe College ACB has the ability to be a useful tool for those who want discuss issues that really matter rather than arguing over who is better than who.
The current trend on College ACB is only digging us into a deeper hole than we are already in. Every grammatically demolished hate post that is added by someone who has nothing better to do than to sit behind their computer and gossip like 14-year-old middle school girl needs to get a life. If this ever stops, maybe there’s a chance we could finally unite together for a common goal.
Chasen Doerr is a junior journalism major and contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
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