Juice, the Whole Juice and Nothing but the Juice

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Georgetown University students had some questions for gossip Web site founder Matt Ivester. Such as, why can't you prevent people's reputations from being smeared on your site? Why don't you take down the racist comments? Do you know some students are so distraught about the things said about them that they might drop out of school?

And, how do you sleep at night?

It was the first time that Ivester had taken questions from students anywhere about JuicyCampus.com, the fast-growing gossip Web site he created that is igniting controversies on campuses across the country. It encourages people to post gossip anonymously. And so they do, naming names and spreading detailed rumors about sex, drugs, college life and sex. Well, mostly about sex.

It's not unlike the bathroom wall at a dive bar, except that anyone, anywhere, can read it. And it never gets erased or painted over.

A moderator started the Georgetown session by reading a question that many of the students had asked: Is stuff on this site going to keep me from getting a job? Because even if the site's users and readers know to take it all with a grain of salt, employers might not be amused.

Ivester told the students that a Google search would not dig up JuicyCampus posts; the site is coded to block search engines, he said.

But with many Georgetown students considering jobs in the U.S. Foreign Service or another government post for which they would undergo intensive background checks, the moderator said, couldn't this, in fact, jeopardize some people's chances?

"I think they're going to have to start developing a sense of humor," said Ivester, who is JuicyCampus's chief executive. "It's not going to work if they start taking unsubstantiated, ridiculous gossip as the truth."

Ah, but that's the trouble. It might not be the truth, and it might be only gossip, but once it's posted, it's out there for all who wish to look at it. And lots of people are looking. The year-old site is bubbling away on 500 campuses and prompting talk of lawsuits, investigations by two state attorneys general, hate groups on the social networking site Facebook and votes by several student governments to ban it from campus. Twice, police have swooped in to investigate students who threatened mass shootings online.

It's an example, several lawyers specializing in new media said, of the way technology is changing far more swiftly than the law.

And it's the latest sign of the rapidly eroding privacy of a generation that, through social networks such as Facebook and media such as videos and cellphone cameras, are tearing down walls that their parents and grandparents had always thought were solid.

"The fact is," Ivester told the students who packed the auditorium Tuesday night, "the Internet is changing privacy as we know it."

* * *

Anyone can post on JuicyCampus. Comments run the gamut, from funny to inscrutable to offensive to pathetic to the wildly unprintable. In recent days, people posting to Georgetown's section have wondered what the school's easiest classes are and debated whether the football team should be abolished. And they also asked for names of sluts, discussed a couple always at the gym together and what their sex must be like, whether certain guys are gay, who a certain stunning freshman was, whether soccer guys are hot and whether a certain girl has herpes.

Ivester, who was the president of his fraternity at Duke University and graduated in 2005, told the Georgetown students that when he launched the site, he hoped it would be an unfiltered forum for college kids to talk about whatever they wanted and share funny stories and crazy high jinks.

What surprised him, he said, was the turn that it took to something that can be ugly, offensive and mean-spirited. But that doesn't mean he's changing anything about JuicyCampus.

He will remove posts to the Web site only if there is hate speech, spam or private contact information such as a phone number. Most of the time when he gets a request to remove material, he responds with a boilerplate e-mail that ends with, "The content provided by users is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."

When he finished explaining this to the Georgetown students, he looked up, grinned and added the last line: "Keep it juicy."

In fact, several legal scholars said, there's not much that anyone can do to stop the gossip on JuicyCampus.

The emerging consensus interpretation of federal law gives far greater weight to protecting free speech than to protecting privacy for individuals, said Daniel Solove, a professor at George Washington University Law School. The law provides a very strong immunity to a Web site that asks users to contribute information, he said.

"I think sites like JuicyCampus that solicit this information shouldn't get a free pass to gossip," because it creates invasions of privacy and the potential to smear someone's reputation, Solove said. "But it's very difficult, under current law, to do a whole lot" to prevent that.

Still, authorities are trying. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in an interview yesterday that his office has an ongoing investigation into JuicyCampus for consumer deception, fraud or misleading statements. "They said in their terms of service that they would not tolerate harassing, threatening messages, when in fact they certainly are doing so," Blumenthal said. In June, the company changed those terms, he said, to say they reserve the right not to enforce them. "They've abdicated any responsibility for defamatory or hateful racist or anti-religious posts," he said.

Ivester said he couldn't comment on an ongoing investigation other than to say he is more confident than ever that the site is not in violation of any laws.

* * *

Many hope the site will just die off naturally, when students stop using it. Its revenue is based on selling ads (which can be trickier if the site is controversial, Ivester acknowledged) and advertisers are looking for how many people they can reach. Ivester declined to give traffic data, but according to ComScore, the site had 47,000 unique visitors in September.

Lime Blue, the company behind JuicyCampus, is still in the red, Ivester said, as it expands.

And it is growing: He wants to add photos, and video, more schools, more features.

At the Georgetown session, a student asked: "You could take this technology, and your brain, and use it for something good. What is it that drives you?"

Ivester laughed before answering. "That's a great question, and there are mornings when I don't know. I'm hoping students will be acting more responsibly as we have more discussions like this. . . . I want to add tabs about drinking, sex and drugs. I think that stuff is fun. I guess that's what keeps me going."

Yesterday, there was a new thread of commentary on Georgetown's JuicyCampus channel -- about Ivester.

"Wishes he was Google," another wrote.

"Totally awesome," another said.

And, in an another thread: "This is what the site is for, after all. Crazy college stories."