JuicyCampus shuts down

Thursday marked the curtain call for the controversial website, an anonymous public forum that that became a mechanism for perpetuating gossip online. After its launch in August 2007, JuicyCampus expanded to cover more than 500 colleges in the United States, but funding failed to match the website’s growth.

“JuicyCampus’ exponential growth outpaced [the company’s] ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn,” founder and CEO Matt Ivester wrote on the site’s official blog. “In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved.”

The shutting down of JuicyCampus concludes the legal and financial issues of the site, as well as ending student protests against it.

In February 2008, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram subpoenaed the website to investigate potential violations of the Consumer Fraud Act (CFA), which seeks to protect consumers against fraudulent and deceptive business practices. While JuicyCampus claimed to prohibit posts that were “unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortuous, defamatory, obscene, libelous, or invasive of another’s privacy,” the website’s enforcement of the terms of use was called into question.

According to Bill Potter ’68, a partner at the Princeton-based law firm Potter & Dickson, CFA cases, depending on their complexity, can last from several months to a year and can incur thousands of dollars in legal services fees.

“[CFA] cases involve possible jury trials with defendants facing the award of treble damages plus attorney’s fees, so they are very serious and can last a long time in the ‘pretrial mode’ alone, which may explain why most are settled and therefore never go to trial,” Potter said.

In addition, JuicyCampus saw the discontinuation of support from advertisers, including Google, because of violations of terms of service, a spokesman for Google told The Chronicle for Higher Education last spring.

Students have also led concentrated efforts against JuicyCampus. In response to anonymous malicious speech, then-Class of 2010 president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne launched the “Own What You Think” campaign in spring 2008. The campaign included an online petition signed by hundreds of University students and a “Love Wall” outside Frist that displayed positive affirmations written by students about themselves and others.

Since that time, JuicyCampus has fallen out of student favor, said Bryan Locascio ’11, who signed the campaign’s petition.

“JuicyCampus sort of fell off [after Diemand-Yauman’s campaign], and I didn’t really hear anyone talk about the site anymore,” Locascio said. “As far as it goes here on campus, its closing probably won’t affect too many people. I haven’t heard of anyone using it since last year.”

JuicyCampus’ disintegration has not removed slander and its effects from college campuses, Diemand-Yauman noted.

“While I’m glad to see that this particular gossip site has shut down, the problems caused by anonymous character assassination in an academic setting should still be addressed,” Diemand-Yauman said. “I’ve always looked at JuicyCampus as a symptom of a larger problem. Therefore, my aims were not to address JuicyCampus, but rather to address the social and cultural structure that made JuicyCampus so popular.”