It’s the guilty pleasure and gossip column of an entire campus, seeing into people’s sexiest, darkest and funniest confessions. Of course I’m talking about the notorious Facebook confession pages that include Vandal Confessions 2.0, Greek Confession UIdaho and Vandal Crushes.
The Vandal Confessions 2.0 page made its comeback a little over a month ago after being shut down last year, and has already gotten 1,920 likes on its page. Not to mention the students — like myself — who haphazardly check up on the page, but do not “like” the page.
A good amount of the posts are relatively harmless. These posts include a mixture of sappy love confessions, missed connections and one or two rants about UI policy. Overall, the page has not gotten out of hand — yet.
Between these funny and entertaining posts, there consist wildly inappropriate ones that range from the sexually demeaning to the downright crude.
Here are some of the most disturbing confessions:
“Dear African girl trying to steal something that’s not yours — I swear to god I will rip that weave right out of your head and strangle you with it.”
“Whenever my roommate comes back with hickies on her neck, I can’t help but think what a slut she is. I mean come on, doesn’t she know that hickies are for below the waist?!!”
“I can’t help but notice how sexy you are every day with your swimmer bun sitting in front of me in class…. oh the things I would do to you if only you knew who I was…”
These comments were published for almost 2,000 students to see. Tasteless comments like these were the main reason the first Vandal Confessions page was shutdown last year, after administrators voluntarily shut down the page.
The majority of these posts are — relatively — undamaging and provide entertaining and popular content for UI students.
However, these highly inappropriate posts should not be allowed on the page.
This responsibility falls to the anonymous administrators. It is the responsibility of the page’s administrators to consider the ethical problems when posting confessions.
At this point, it appears the administrators are failing to do this, and are simply posting any and all confessions that appear in their mailbox. That being said, this is all speculation. The UI community has no clue who the administrators are, how many there are or even their ethical standards.
Posting an ethics policy for the page would be a positive move in setting some sort of standard that would provide more clarity for viewers, and might even discourage people from submitting unacceptable confessions.
These confession pages should be a fun way to communicate with people and share campus stories. And here’s the great part, it can be that — if administrators assume responsibility for the content they post and consider the ethical implications of their page. Without this, the inevitable will happen — inappropriate confessions will be posted and the page will become out of control, hurting many in the process.
Ryan Tarinelli can be reached at [email protected]