When I first started college, I was stoked at the prospect of living in a new place and forging friendships with so many of the new people I’d meet here. I remember feeling excited to discover that others shared this eagerness, and in the first few weeks of the semester, a number of accounts geared towards Macalester students popped up as Instagram recommendations. These accounts pertained to various aspects of the Macalester student experience — student orgs, squirrels spotted across campus and Cafe Mac concoctions — and I took them as opportunities to learn more about things that students care about and as a way to connect with others.
Among those, there were also a handful of anonymous submission accounts, where students could send in messages of pretty much any kind to the account moderators, who would then post those submissions without any name attached and for all of their peers to see. At the time, I thought nothing of how these accounts worked and the purposes they served. I simply saw them as additional spaces for getting to know other students who just shared the things that they wanted to say. I got caught up in the excitement, and it was easy for that to happen when everyone around me was doing the exact same thing. It would take a few semesters before the rose colored glasses came off, and I recognized that what was actually happening on those platforms was very different from what I wanted them to be.
During the spring of my junior year, I first heard about the anonymous social media platform Fizz. Originally created by two Stanford University students during the COVID-19 pandemic with the intention of “fostering authentic online communities” (at least according to their website), the app started at Stanford but has since spread to dozens of college campuses across the country. Although institutions are unaffiliated with the platform, each Fizz-enrolled school, including Macalester, has its own online community for its student body.
Based on how Fizz has been used across our campus, I think it’s safe to say that the results are in many ways antithetical to how the app has been marketed. I don’t particularly care to make reference to any specific posts, and I think it’s important to clarify that I’ve never used the app or personally experienced what goes on in that online space. However, word of the many horrible things that peers say to and about one another on Fizz spreads rapidly across Macalester’s campus to even those who don’t have the app downloaded. After a while, I took a step back and started to think about what I or anyone else who engaged with similar platforms was actually getting from those interactions.
There are numerous problems with Fizz at Macalester and the ways in which we use and interact with one another on anonymous social media platforms like it. It is undeniable that many of the discussions that have taken place on Fizz are offensive and deeply harmful, and several have evolved into forms of bullying, harassment and discrimination. I’m less interested in explaining how we can and should change our behavior in such settings, however. To do so would be to focus on repairing something that I think we should be avoiding altogether. What I find most concerning is our engagement with anonymous social media platforms in the first place, and I have doubts about whether there are any good reasons for it.
Anonymous social media platforms as a whole are often backed by the argument that they enable unfiltered conversation where individuals can more freely express their opinions, and that they promote community-building because the aspect of anonymity makes it easier to connect with others. On paper, these apps are centered around making communication accessible, and I don’t deny that some healthy relationships and exchanges have come from them. But the sheer amount of harm produced from irresponsible usage cannot justify our engagement.
I like to think that the majority of those who choose to use those anonymous platforms do not go into them with the intention of disrespecting and hurting others, but it’s a trap that more of us fall into than we’d like to admit. It’s not a novel move on my part to raise the question of why anyone would want to be part of a “community” built on hate, but I’ll reiterate the point anyways.
In many instances, I’d also argue that the good things that stem from anonymous social media platforms are far more meaningful in real life. Receiving an anonymous compliment or shoutout is nice, but I know that I personally would find it even more special to hear those words come directly from the person sharing them, because it takes guts to tell someone to their face how you think or feel. I think that a similar case can be made for the debates that unfold on those platforms: there’s value in standing behind an opinion and letting it be known by others, and we can learn and grow from bringing disagreement into our actual lives.
Even if we only mean the best and genuinely see the potential for anonymous social media platforms to be avenues for connection and honest communication with others, too much goes wrong in those spaces for us to be negligent. In my first year at Macalester, I did forge friendships with people I met across campus and did gain a deeper understanding of what matters to them, but that didn’t happen in those online spaces as I thought it would. After four years of being a student at Macalester, I can say with confidence that the real sense of community and belonging that I felt was when I decided to turn off my phone and actually talk to people. For those coming back in the fall, I’d urge you to do the same.
