Mary O’Leary discusses the controversy surrounding campus crush pages.
Every UCD student has seen them. Instagram pages for campus crushes, module gossip, and study group secrets. They’re everywhere, with seemingly more and more copies showing up every year. But why are these pages so popular? And what are the pros and cons of having such accounts up in general?
At a first glance, these pages offer a fun way for students to interact with and become a part of their student community. Classmates can send in grievances for overbearing professors or chat about a pretty girl they saw in Blue Bird. All the while, they can stay anonymous, without any worry that their confessions will come back to haunt them.
It can be fun for the crushes as well, with many students eagerly trying to figure out if a post is for them or one of their friends, not to mention the guessing game for which one of their classmates might have been admiring them from afar. That being said, these crush pages aren’t wholly positive, and thus it begs the question of how these accounts have the potential to negatively impact the student body.
Many of these pages also post confessions about how other students smell, look, and act within their classes. Much of the time, the exact class is named, taking away a level of anonymity for the person being posted about. Who's to say that such students won’t be called out or publicly embarrassed in the future by such posts? In that sense, consent is a key factor missing from many of these accounts, with the vast majority of those posted about having no prior knowledge of their information being released online.
This also begs the question of how pages like these might encourage actions such as stalking, harassment, and invasion of privacy. Even those who are posted about positively still don’t consent to their information being shared online, and there’s no guarantee that they will find their secret admirer flattering. With the anonymity of the admirer's identity, the relationship between both of them is imbalanced in favor of the person sharing what could be private information on the internet.
This is not to say that those who participate in these pages or run these accounts are inherently immoral or creepy, only that caution should be taken in how these pages are run and how we engage with them. The privacy of students, especially when their consent isn’t given, should be a top priority. Classmates shouldn’t have to feel anxious about going into a tutorial or seminar that was explicitly referenced in a post about them.
These pages will most likely continue to be a large part of the online UCD community and their submissions along with them. That being said, there are ways to mitigate some of these issues, such as not releasing the name of the module the student is in, keeping physical identifiers to a minimum, and taking down a post if asked to by the person in it. Who knows, maybe this article will be the next post you see on UCD Yaps or Confessions...