By CJ Guion
On February 5th, 2009 many college students around the world were distraught to hear that their favorite college gossip website Juicy Campus was being shutdown due to economic reasons. The site which was notorious for controversial anonymous comments that gave college students the opportunity to post their thoughts regarding various events and occurrences on their campuses with the benefit of concealing their identity.
Following the demise of Juicy Campus, traffic was immediately redirected to Collegeacb.com (College Anonymous Confession Board) and the site continues to thrive today. While it is not as popular as its predecessor, the site is estimated to receive 500,000 hits a day.
A couple of months ago, Site Manager Peter Frank sold his share in the company to a set of new managers who will take over control of the web page. The new managers stated on their home page that they intend to transform CollegeACB into a productive and positive place to have anonymous conversations. The site has increased its popularity since its inception, and is utilized on many college campuses across the nation including NC State University.
The NC State section of the website appears to be one which is dominated by discussions involving select fraternities and sororities on campus. One might also find discussions and rants about subjects such as the best/worst candidate for recent Student Body elections, student housing, and the best professors to take for various subjects. From time to time, there are posts which feature offensive language directed towards protected groups and individual students on campus. However, according to the First Amendment right in some cases this is perfectly acceptable and fair.
College ACB is at the head of the class when it comes to college gossip sites on the web; many other websites have began to appear such as Campus Gossip which features pictures and videos of unsuspecting college students from campuses around the nation, even students from this very own campus or at least that’s what the captions say.
In any case, students may want to browse the site to make sure that false information is not being displayed on the Internet which could damage their images. Innocent comments and pictures out of fun could come back to haunt select students when they begin applying for jobs.
