College Gossip Site Closes Under Pressure of Economy, State Probes

It’s unclear how much the investigations may have scared off would-be advertisers. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and New Jersey counterpart Anne Milgram crowed over the site’s demise but took little credit for it. They accused the site of having failed to enforce routine bans in its terms of service against posting hateful or libelous speech and private information about others.

But a competing company angling to win over users of the defunct site told us that it’s confident it can avoid JuicyCampus’s fate by having users police for policy violations. Craigslist has long relied on that mechanism to flag prohibited material, but it found itself in states’ crosshairs as well for loose rules on postings for “erotic services” (WID Nov 7 p2).

“In the past year and a half, JuicyCampus has become synonymous with college gossip,” offering comment boards for more than 500 campuses and drawing a million visitors monthly, CEO Matt Ivester said in a farewell post on the company blog. But ad revenue and venture capital funding have “dissolved,” and the site’s “exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn,” he said. Ivester acknowledged that the site included “mean-spirited posts and personal attacks,” which “none of us will miss.” But he said they had prompted “meaningful discussion about online privacy and Internet censorship.”

Ivester previously had compared to Chinese censorship the actions of colleges that blocked access to JuicyCampus on campus. He said the accusations by Connecticut and New Jersey ultimately would be defeated by the immunity under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if tested in court (WID March 28 p9). Congressional Internet Caucus Co- Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., mentioned JuicyCampus when he suggested a variation on the DMCA takedown procedure for defamatory comments (WID Aug 8 p1).

The state investigations had nothing to do with JuicyCampus’s shutdown, Ivester said. Blumenthal and Milgram never brought charges, and the site’s shutdown is unrelated to any private litigation, he said. JuicyCampus advertisers “have spent less, but have remained loyal,” and only a handful of campuses fully banned the site, Ivester said. “Our traffic levels have remained very strong.” The company decided only Feb. 2 to throw in the towel, he said. Ivester said he'll be consulting with startups in the Los Angeles area. JuicyCampus couldn’t be reached to elaborate.

New Jersey started an investigation in March 2008 into whether its Consumer Fraud Act had been violated by JuicyCampus. The state issued a subpoena to owner Lime Blue for information on how it enforced its terms of service. Especially troubling to Milgram, she said, was that students were often identified by their full names in references on the site. Her office subpoenaed ad network AdBrite for information on how JuicyCampus represented its operations and what kinds of ads and keywords it requested from AdBrite. Google received a similar letter from Milgram over AdSense ads on JuicyCampus. Both companies said they had pulled their ads over the site’s content before receiving the subpoenas.

Blumenthal took a different tack, saying he would “compel” the site to adopt “effective anti-abuse mechanisms” so users can flag lurid comments for site review. A spokeswoman for Blumenthal told us the office had never been in touch with advertisers. “JuicyCampus is deservedly dead -- out of juice and financially ruined after our investigation revealed it was failing to fulfill its own promises to prohibit abusive and obscene posts,” Blumenthal said. It’s unclear whether he contends that content on JuicyCampus literally meets the strict legal definition of obscenity. Blumenthal, one of the leading AGs pushing social networking sites to protect children from adult solicitation, called JuicyCampus posters “predators.”

Milgram said changes that JuicyCampus made -- making instructions for reporting complaints more prominent, posting policies on JuicyCampus.com instead of its Blogspot blog, and getting TRUSTe privacy certification -- were inadequate. The site retained “its most problematic features, including the encouragement of anonymous postings” and failure to follow up on complaints, she said. Milgram’s office couldn’t be reached about whether it contacted or subpoenaed JuicyCampus’s recent advertisers.

Visitors to JuicyCampus.com are now redirected to the blog for CollegeACB.com, or Anonymous Confession Board, which advertises itself as the “replacement” for JuicyCampus. “We wish to promote deep and thoughtful discussion,” on “taboo” subjects such as sex and sexuality, that won’t necessarily “turn into a discussion about specific people in a highly negative manner,” as often happened on JuicyCampus, said a post Thursday. CollegeACB indulges in “the occasional ‘gossipy’ post,” though. The site relies on user moderation to flag “threatening, racist or otherwise illegal” posts. A button on each post, when clicked, sends a report to the webmaster. Unlike JuicyCampus, it limits visitors to viewing and posting by school rather than allowing general browsing of every school on the same page.

CollegeACB may still find itself in trouble with university or state officials for site content. Our cursory review turned up a lengthy post about sexual encounters between two 14-year-old males, posted in November and described as “child porn” by another commenter, and another that linked to what it called “jailbait” pictures of a scantily-clad young woman. Sex -- campus requests and offers -- is the dominant subject, though other subjects have created long discussions. Bryn Mawr’s page on CollegeACB includes a post by a couple recruiting a participant in a threesome. It got 31 replies. But there were 67 replies to a post asking who is the “best-dressed on campus.” Ultimately CollegeACB may be too dull for its gossipy audience. Several posts across school boards lament the demise of JuicyCampus and say CollegeACB doesn’t compare.

The site’s terms of use are much more specific than those of JuicyCampus, telling users to not post or flag comments that are “excessively sexist, homophobic, racist or otherwise extremely and intentionally harmful to specific people.” But it also disclaims any responsibility to “actively” review the site content, or for “abuse of any kind” that happens on the “Crush List,” where students can submit the e-mail addresses of their crushes to see if there are any matches.

Peter Frank, a freshman at Wesleyan University, runs CollegeACB.com after buying it from its developers at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins University, who've graduated. He told us by e-mail that he had approached JuicyCampus’s Lime Blue “to buy the traffic” to JuicyCampus.com “for a set period of time.” He’s not worried about state AGs threatening the site or its advertisers, because it has received few complaints alleging libel. It may be a dicey time for the site, though. “The reporting feature is not yet 100% functional as we have just added a large number of colleges without adding user support -- this will come soon,” Frank said. He said he will “moderate as much as is necessary in ensuring that it doesn’t devolve into a cesspool of hateful and obscene posts,” but once the reporting feature is functional across all school boards, “we'll be using user moderation (almost entirely) to keep the posts clean.”