Why an app is at the center of the crisis at US universities

The still recent history of social networks is marked by a certain search for exclusivity – especially on the part of younger people.

The rule is: if your parents use the same app as you, something is wrong.

That’s why Facebook lost its audience to Instagram, which in turn was replaced by TikTok (whose throne will soon be taken by another platform).

According to experts in the field, this desire to participate in selective virtual environments has become even more intense among Generation Z individuals, those born between the mid-1990s and 2010.

This, by the way, is the target audience for Sidechat, an APP that has entered the center of the ongoing crisis in American universities since the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023.

According to the newspaper The New York Timesthere are pro-Palestinian camps set up in around 40 higher education institutions in the country – in 15 of them, the police had to intervene to avoid violent conflicts.

And the protesters’ main means of communication is precisely Sidechat, which combines two “perfect” features for the moment: it can only be used by university students and allows anonymity.

Thanks to the second feature, hate speech runs rampant in posts. Offenses, intimidation and threats (including death threats) come from both sides of this cultural war.

But anti-Semitism far outweighs Islamophobia in the content analyzed by educators, security authorities and, now, politicians.

In a statement released in March, Nick Bartley, spokesman for the Republican-led House Education Committee, expressed his concerns about the use of the platform and included other campus sectors in the controversy.

“Sidechat allowed students, faculty and staff to post anti-Semitic messages anonymously. The committee, as part of its investigation, wants to know how universities are dealing with this issue”, he stated.

To get an idea of ​​the degree of harassment observed in posts of the app, pro-Palestinian users at Columbia University in New York even shared the location of a Jewish student’s dormitory so that the place could be vandalized.

The reason for the revolt? The boy simply removed a political pamphlet that was glued to the wall of a corridor in the institution.

In a hearing held by the committee on April 17, Columbia president Minouche Shafik added to the chorus of discontent with Sidechat.

For her, the platform is “poisonous” and was the scene of “the most flagrant cases of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racism that occurred on social media”.

Similar situations were observed at Harvard, Brown, Yale, Tufts, Princeton and the universities of Texas, California, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The latter was the only one who took some kind of action: she blocked access to Sidechat on her campus’ Wi-Fi.

“The platform demonstrated a reckless disregard for the well-being of young people and a complete indifference to bullying”, said the institution’s president, James L. Oblinger, in an official statement.

Oblinger’s effort, however, is practically symbolic, as students continue to access the APP through the data networks of their personal devices.

In general, the deans say their hands are tied, as prohibiting the use of a messaging application violates American ideals of freedom of expression.

In March, during a meeting open to the public, Brown President Christina Paxson was asked whether a university could prevent access to Sidechat.

“Leaving aside concerns about censorship, which we take very seriously, the answer is: no,” he said.

Content moderation is done by university students and artificial intelligence tools

In interviews he gives to the press, Sebastian Gil, one of the creators of Sidechat, insists on repeating a single speech.

According to him, the application maintains a team of 30 content moderators, in addition to artificial intelligence trained to identify “threatening, offensive or profane” posts.

And, judging by its most recent statements, the only concrete measure taken by the platform after the start of tensions was to also delete posts that directly mention student names.

Problematic messages, however, continue to be removed only after they have already gone live.

Another criticism of the application concerns the moderation itself. It is questioned how much of the material is analyzed only by AI tools and, mainly, the fact that the majority of moderators are students from the universities included in the social network.

The magazine specializing in technology Wired talked about the topic with two students from different backgrounds at Brown, in the state of Rhode Island, one of the oldest and most traditional universities in the USA.

Both often publish articles focusing on the “divisive” environment of the country’s higher education institutions.

“Artificial intelligence simply cannot detect all dehumanizing rhetoric and language. This is something that cannot be decided by filtering keywords or just taking the message at face value,” said Palestinian Aboud Ashhab.

Jewish student Andrew Rovinsky believes that Sidechat should not operate with university moderators.

“Because obviously each of us has our own prejudices and notions about what is and what is not hate speech. And we are also directly interested parties in this ecosystem online.”

In 2023, Sidechat purchased another app accused of enabling racist threats

In fact, the “seed” of all this tension was planted about ten years ago, with the emergence of the Yik Yak platform.

Quite popular at the beginning of its activities, the social network soon gained support among American university students because it allowed users to access messages published by people as far away as a radius of just 8 kilometers.

However, four years after its debut, Yik Yak died on the beach, under accusations of allowing toxic content and racist threats.

The company decided to relaunch the product in 2021. Two years later, it was purchased by another similar application recently arriving on the market: Sidechat.

Sebastian Gil and his partners’ proposal consisted of combining Yik Yak features with some concepts from Facebook in its early days – when Mark Zuckerberg’s network was aimed exclusively at university students.

But, symptomatically, the new feature has already gone live with a feature considered “segregationist” by its critics: the APP can only be downloaded by iPhone owners.

In 2022, even before the pro-Palestine protests in the USA, an article on the website Boston.com I already warned about this nature of the application.

Heard by the report, a student at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, said that Android users were ridiculed for not being able to use certain features only available on the iPhone – and, according to him, Sidechat reinforced this form of bullying.

“It’s like it’s boring to talk to me because I don’t have enough money. This makes me feel bad, because it is something that is not really under my control”, said the boy at the time.

It was not for lack of warning, therefore, that Sidechat could create tension in virtual interactions between students.

With the damage already done, authorities are now putting pressure on creators to develop tools capable of moderating content more effectively – a challenge to be overcome since the advent of anonymity online.