College students love Sidechat. Colleges, not so much.
College students love social media. But one app especially strikes their fancy. It's called Sidechat and it lets them gossip anonymously about all the latest campus drama. All they have to do is fork over their school email address.
Colleges, on the other hand, don’t love Sidechat so much. And members of Congress are increasingly alarmed by its content.
A sort of virtual quad where college students across the country sound off on just about everything, Sidechat has played a central role in the House education committee’s ongoing probes into antisemitism at a handful of schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University in New York City.
Last month, when the committee slapped Harvard with a subpoena – the first time the legislative body has issued such a demand to a university – Sidechat played a big role in that request. Lawmakers ordered the college to round up antisemitic posts on the social media platform.
Read more: Harvard, under fire for campus antisemitism, hit with subpoenas in House GOP probe
Administrators at Harvard and leaders at the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish anti-hate organization, sat down separately with the executives from Sidechat in recent months, urging the company to crack down on hateful content as college campuses nationwide devolved into turmoil over the Israel-Hamas war.
Read more: Israel-Hamas war stirs free-speech battles at college campuses across US
The company has said it’s working on it. Responding to the House subpoena this week, Harvard told the committee that Sidechat agreed to limit app users to just undergraduates on the Ivy League campus. The company’s top brass assured the university its content moderation guidelines were being “strictly enforced.”
The controversy shines a spotlight on the influential platform, which has largely tried to evade scrutiny since its launch about two years ago. The app's role in allowing users to whip up hate on college campuses, largely without significant consequences for the instigators, has forced some school administrators to take a more hands-on approach than they're used to in policing its usage.
The phenomenon is raising larger questions, too. On an anonymous app, can students violate the real-life policies of the schools they attend? Should colleges do more to prevent students from virtually and anonymously violating campus rules? And if universities could monitor what students are saying, how anonymous is the app, really?
Lawmakers in Washington haven’t held the social media company’s feet to the fire in the same way they did a trio of university presidents. Yet it has become clear that some people in Congress don’t like what they’re seeing – and they believe schools share the blame for allowing hateful posts to continue.
“The use of Sidechat on college campuses has allowed students, faculty, and staff to post antisemitic hate anonymously,” said Nick Barley, a spokesperson for the GOP-led House education committee, in a recent statement. “The Committee is rightly asking universities within the scope of its antisemitism investigation about how they are responding to this issue.”
In an email to USA TODAY, Sidechat cofounder Sebastian Gil said the app has a team of 30 content moderators who work "24/7" reviewing posts. He said accounts are banned after a “single severe violation” of the platform’s community guidelines. Those rules require accounts to be suspended and banned if they spread anything that qualifies as hate speech under a “Racism and Bigotry” provision.
Despite the scrutiny, the company has not turned over user information to Congress or the universities, and they have yet to ask for it, even in cases where officials say discriminatory posts caused problems.
“We recognize these are difficult times on campuses and we’re committed to ensuring Sidechat remains a safe environment for students,” the app's cofounder wrote.
What is Sidechat?
College campuses have long been the locus of popular social media apps. Facebook was started at Harvard as a means for college students to interact on the nascent web.
Young people eventually soured on Facebook as it grew more popular with the general public. Other social media platforms, like Instagram and Snapchat, later joined the fray. But collegegoers seemed to have a penchant for keeping their names out of their hottest takes.
Then came Yik Yak, an anonymous gossip app that exploded among young people about a decade ago. The social network let people post namelessly on a forum that included anyone within a 1.5-mile radius of a user. It had millions of monthly users in 2014.
But by 2017, it had fallen out of fashion, beset by problems with hate speech and violent threats. Some schools even blocked wireless access to it. The app was so ostracized that it even shut down for a few years before quietly reentering the App Store in 2021.
In 2022, Sidechat rolled out on several Ivy League campuses. Similar to Yik Yak, the app let people post anonymously. Except unlike its predecessor, the new app promised to build more intimate communities. Rather than being location-focused, users only needed to be affiliated with a college. The app asked users to verify their school email addresses to create an account.
Students can opine about anything on Sidechat, from national politics to the menu options at the dining hall. That mixture of different topics, combined with the app's anonymity and intimacy, encourages lots of unfiltered opinions, said Kenneth Joseph, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University at Buffalo who studies social media.
"This is a place where people feel comfortable saying things they might not otherwise say," Joseph said. "It's that kind of perfect storm."
Sidechat's next move was to pay students like T.K. Monford, a 21-year-old junior at Brown University, to promote the platform among their peers. Monford was recruited as an ambassador by the company when the app launched on his Rhode Island campus in March 2022.
“It’s actually become a bigger part of campus than I think I ever expected,” he told USA TODAY.
Last year, Sidechat took over Yik Yak, merging the companies under the same app developer. While Sidechat's executives hoped to replicate some of the success of Yik Yak, they wanted to avoid the same issues with hate speech and lack of control that doomed the predecessor.
Then came a war on the other side of the world, and a new set of challenges.
A 'disturbing rise' in hate speech
Unlike on other social networks, posts on Sidechat aren’t filtered before they go public. That’s a big difference from forums like Reddit, where moderators approve posts before they’re shared more widely.
In the weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in Israel, Sidechat spilled over with hateful content. Harvard reported a “disturbing rise” in antisemitic posts. And there were similar reports on other campuses.
In a nationwide survey of more than 5,000 college students conducted by the ADL before and after the Hamas attacks, roughly one in 10 students reported recently seeing someone associated with their university post something anti-Jewish on social media.
Sidechat seemed to offer a glimpse into what some people were saying in unsupervised spaces.
“On many campuses, the norms against antisemitism have been totally eradicated,” said Adam Neufeld, a senior vice president and the chief impact officer at the ADL.
Neufeld said his organization met with Gil, the top official at Sidechat, as the situation with posts on the app – and on physical college campuses – worsened. They urged him to release more detailed community guidelines, with specific examples of what types of content violate its policies.
Sidechat hasn't done that. But the company insists that antisemitism, racism and bigotry "have no place" on the platform.
Until the company does a better job moderating content on the app, Neufeld said colleges must make an effort to work more closely with Sidechat. School email addresses, after all, are the foundation of its business model, he said.
“What I’d like to see is a much stronger partnership between Sidechat and schools,” he said, “so that this does not become the loophole by which Jews and other historically marginalized populations are harassed online in ways that protect the harasser.”
Zachary Schermele covers education and breaking news for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Anonymous campus app Sidechat has a hate speech problem, critics say
