Campus Hate Lives on the Internet. Administrators Need to Catch Up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/college-social-media-hate.html

Version 0 of 1.

Is there a difference between “real life” and the digital realm?

I’ve heard parents and professors talk about these worlds as distinct, but for young people who have grown up with the internet, they are one and the same.

One thing that hasn’t been acknowledged enough is how the generation gap has been widened by rapid technological change, especially in regard to social media. The internet is integral to almost every aspect of the lives of young people. The social problems that unfold online are just as real to us as those that happen face to face.

In college, this generational social media gap has become a source of misunderstanding and miscommunication between students and administrators. If a problem among students is playing out online, administrators may not know how to help for a number of reasons: They may see the problem as relegated to the digital realm. Or they may not know how the app or platform in question even works.

I first became aware of this issue last November when black students at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a junior, were targeted on a messaging app called GroupMe.

Just a few days after the presidential election, some 200 black freshmen, who had arrived on campus just a few months before, awoke to find themselves added to a GroupMe chat called “Mud Men,” where racists congregated to discuss their demise. This chat had it all: Students were taunted with racial slurs, a “daily lynching” schedule and graphic images of black and brown bodies swinging from trees, bloodied and battered from whips and chains. There were threats to individuals and their families, and tributes to Donald Trump.

GroupMe, it should be said, is a text client like WhatsApp that allows a user to be added to multiple group chats that vary in size from two to 200 members. A group chat over text message requires personal phone numbers or email addresses, but GroupMe is much easier: You can join or be added to different chats using a public Facebook or Google account.

The key to the app’s convenience is also its downside: A person who is a friend of yours on Facebook can add you to a GroupMe chat without your consent.

Last November, news of the “Mud Men” chat spread like wildfire.

Students started noticing the racist chat on the morning of Nov. 11 when freshmen who were targeted posted screenshots of the threats on Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, forcing students inside the Penn bubble — and plenty outside of it — to pay attention. Black organizations sent a barrage of emails and texts to their constituencies about the situation and began to plan for an emergency town hall. By the afternoon, the news had been picked up by national civil rights activists, including Shaun King and DeRay Mckesson. The news was trending on Twitter for hours before the school issued an official response.

There was a palpable uncertainty in the air that day. Was the chat to be taken as a serious threat to the well-being of Penn’s black freshmen and in turn, Penn’s black community? Or was it a joke that got too serious to take back? The motive is still unclear, but the incident certainly made students fearful.

The university was clear in its condemnation of hate and hate speech on Penn’s campus, but the official response came after news had spread to local law enforcement and the media, and after students of color had already met to debrief and discuss the situation.

That problem is not exclusive to the University of Pennsylvania: Many schools are unable to keep up with how quickly the world moves in this digital era.

Don’t get me wrong: Some of the key supporters of black student groups were faculty members who were instrumental in making sure that everyone felt safe and supported and that proper resources were being applied to figuring out who was responsible for the chat’s existence. I just wish that the university had taken steps publicly to support its black students much sooner than it did.

Maybe it sounds unreasonable to expect a college administration to keep up with the speed of internet discourse. But when several campus groups organized walkouts, demonstrations, rallies and marches to signal solidarity with black students, it took the Penn administration several days to publicly join and support the actions.

Black and brown students need more than official statements of concern to feel safe and welcome in college. The GroupMe incident provides a pretty good example of how amorphous online threats can still be powerfully targeted at us in terrifyingly specific ways.

The racist chat appeared to have been created in Oklahoma, but for the creator to have known so many members of the black freshman class, he or she would have to have been at Penn. So black students immediately assumed it was coming from somewhere on campus. There were multiple individuals who were taunting students on this chat, and all were anonymized by pseudonyms. So the big questions were: How many people were involved? Would they act on their covert threats? How much of the population of the school did they speak for? The chats also included a racial taunt that invoked the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon, some chapters of which have been shut down at other campuses for racist behavior. (The Penn S.A.E. chapter immediately denounced the online attacks.)

Working with the F.B.I., the administration was able to identify the creator of the GroupMe chat within a few weeks — a student at the University of Oklahoma who had been accepted to Penn but chose not to attend. The student was suspended, and both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oklahoma issued condemnations of his actions. Ultimately, the investigation found that no Penn students were involved in the chat. But these kinds of incidents make black and brown students increasingly wary.

GroupMe is an important method of communication among hall mates, study group partners, band members, fraternity brothers and sometimes entire classes. It’s not as if we can just stop using the app to avoid racism.

An anonymous attack on GroupMe doesn’t feel that different from racist propaganda in “real life.” Just a few months ago, someone put up neo-Nazi recruitment fliers around campus. They were promptly removed, but the incident had an important thing in common with the GroupMe disaster: anonymity.

The creator of the GroupMe and the people who hung the fliers hid their names and faces, putting the students they were targeting in the precarious position of questioning who to trust.

Who is to blame for a faceless flier or for anonymous internet trolling? Either incident could be indicative of the racist opinions of one person or of many. Online or real world: It’s all the same.