Last week, Cosmopolitan.com published “How Cyberbullying Is Making Sexual Assault On College Campuses Even Worse,” by Katie Van Syckle ’05. Van Syckle discusses recent high-profile Bored at Baker incidents and her own attempts to have an offensive post about her removed. The article suggests that all questionable posts can — and must — be identified and removed by the College and the Hanover Police. Van Syckle seems to attribute offensive posts on Bored at Baker to sinister problems with Dartmouth’s campus culture, not the fundamental setup of the site itself. Bored at Baker may cater to Dartmouth students, yet its content is in no way representative of the student body. Caught up in the furor over controversial posts, we too often treat Bored at Baker as a legitimate arbiter of campus opinion and forget to consider how such offensive content got there in the first place.
Van Syckle repeatedly points out the College’s failure to remove an offensive post about her. Yet is it Dartmouth’s responsibility to intervene in a private forum with which it lacks any direct relationship? Van Syckle claims that, if the College actually cared, it could vanquish such cyberbullying with ease. It would be alarming, however, for the College to enforce a ban on Bored at Baker access or penalize student participation. As students, we reasonably expect to engage in any legal activity on the Internet. A university that chips away at that expectation, even if to prevent potential harm to its students, undermines its commitment to free inquiry. Moreover, based on the claims of Bored at Baker developer Jonathan Pappas, who goes by Jae Daemon online, the College by itself must use guesswork to identify the authors of individual posts and may not even be able to prove anything without student admission of authorship. Any focus on the College as the enforcer of proper online behavior is misplaced.
Yet Bored at Baker frequently comes to the attention of Safety and Security or Hanover Police because many appear to misunderstand what exactly Bored at Baker is. Much like Friendsy or the first iteration of Facebook, its only tie to Dartmouth is the requirement of a Blitz account. It appeals to only a specific niche of Internet users and thus cannot be treated as an accurate microcosm of this campus. Forums with upvote systems, including Bored at Baker and Reddit, inherently incentivize certain types of posts, particularly inflammatory material. Bored at Baker posters who ignore Bored at Baker’s bans on cyberbullying can expect a deluge in responses — or, in other words, the same type of online attention that keeps us glued to Facebook or Instagram. The remedy to this perverse reward system is that Bored at Baker’s moderation team removes offensive material.
Of course, to accept the distorted nature of Bored at Baker’s content is to admit that Bored at Baker does not, in fact, reveal some kind of sickness in Dartmouth’s student body. Bored at Baker does not always offer us an “unfiltered” look into the student psyche. Jae Daemon has previously disclosed that on occasion users “will post their own name or harass themselves.” He has seen “student organizations post the same kind of content that they themselves protest.” Bored at Baker users are keenly aware of their audience. The site’s offensive or off-color posts do not reflect attitudes or opinions held in daily life. For some, Bored at Baker is not an anonymous space to speak their minds without consequence, but rather a type of performance. You need look no further than the site’s infamous “personalities” for evidence of that.
Do some users take it too far? Absolutely. Very few people on this campus would condone the use of Bored at Baker to communicate violent threats or methodically harass individuals. Hanover Police should investigate posts that specifically violate the law, and Bored at Baker should respond effectively to posts flagged as offensive. But it is hardly shocking that Bored at Baker facilitates the airing of distasteful views. There is no effective way for the College to consistently identify and punish members of the Dartmouth community for inappropriate posts. Ultimately, it is up to Bored at Baker itself, not Dartmouth, to minimize the site’s hurtful effects.
