ReputationDefender Blog recently caught this well written piece over at Rotten Little Girls. The post, entitled “The Nasty Side of Social Networking” is both informative and a good read. It also does a good job of articulating some of the more complex issues related to online social networking from a collegiate perspective.

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Specifically, the article looks at the post-privacy reality of Facebook and notes that password protected information can still get online and affect one’s job prespects and digital street cred. It also looks at JuicyCampus, online gossip and the ease with which anonymous posting can ruin people’s names.

As I read through the pages, I was tense and apprehensive. I didn’t see any references to my close friends, but I did find a post specifically about the group of girls living in the housing unit next to me. It said where they lived, which is just creepy, and then the poster called them stuck-up, anorexic, and many expletives I don’t care to repeat here.

ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik even gets a shout out via his quote in the International Herald Tribune:

To quote a recent article in the Herald Tribune, “‘Legally, Juicy Campus is fully, absolutely immune, no matter what it runs on its site from users, just like AOL is not responsible for nasty comments in its AOL chat rooms,’ said Michael Fertik, a graduate of Harvard Law School and the founder of reputationdefender.com, a service that helps clients remove defamatory material about themselves from the Internet…Juicy Campus, he said, ‘is not encouraging people to be themselves, it’s encouraging people to be the worst version of themselves.’”

The article concludes with the author deciding not to participate in anonymous gossip sites.

I’m going to exert as much willpower as I can to avoid Juicy Campus. I think the fact that it promotes prejudice and an anything-goes policy of ripping your classmates to shreds is enough to dissuade me from visiting the site often. That, and I don’t really want to know what my classmates are thinking about me. Some things are better left un-read.

What do you think? Is gossip a harmless part of the wired collegiate experience or is there something nefarious about talking trash about the student body online?

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