Is the juice Worth the Squeeze?

Matt Ivester apparently blows goats. You probably don't know this, and frankly, you probably shouldn't believe it. But that's what it says. Go see for yourself. It's easy. Jump on JuicyCampus.com and search his name. By the looks of it, Matt Ivester is and isn't a lot of things, if you take the online forum at face value. Whether true or not (again, probably not true), the aggregate conviction seems to suggest that he's not a very popular guy.

Every once in a while, when he's perusing the site in a rare spare moment, Ivester takes note: there's just a whole lot of "mean-spirited" stuff. About students and professors, and-evidently-about himself. Yet what's strange is Ivester is JuicyCampus' No. 1 fan: founder, CEO, and resident idealist. The thing is, you can't get all wound up about being outed as a goat-blower if you're the very reason that the forum for that outing is in existence, is flourishing and is potentially en route to making you heaps of filthy, juicy cash.

But there's a problem. After sauntering into the national spotlight this winter, big-time players started to pay attention: national newspapers and magazines, and more importantly of late, pissed-off state Attorneys General. By the time this piece runs, JuicyCampus will have been forced to respond to New Jersey and Connecticut's investigations into potential violation of consumer protection laws. The two Attorneys General have a couple concerns: primarily, that JC administrators are not following their own terms and conditions by not doing all that they can to take down the truly dangerous and defamatory posts. The administrators counter by claiming that their rules say they merely have the discretion-but not necessarily the obligation-to remove content. Secondarily, the Attorneys General are concerned that administrators are misrepresenting the site's anonymity pact-that the first half of the site's tag, "Always Anonymous." may not always be an accurate representation of how things go down.

This is the state of affairs: in less than one school year, JuicyCampus could be subject to the kind of story arc typically reserved for films about sex and drugs and scandals-which happens to be the very content that enlivens the site. In those epic plots, it always begins with obscurity. Then there's the part when the prime-time player is invincible-golden, infamous, untouchable. And inevitably, there is the crash: the fiery fall, often at the hands of incendiary jurisprudence. Whether or not New Jersey and Connecticut's charges pan out remains to be seen, but one can't help but take these early legal moves as indications of the maelstrom into which Ivester and his site's unabated juice are heading.

After graduating from Duke in 2005, Ivester-a former fraternity president and economics major-spent about a year and a half at Marakon Associates, a strategy consulting firm in New York. He dabbled in other ventures, but he won't talk about them, not with the press at least. These days, it's just JuicyCampus.

In February, Ivester was in his office in Los Angeles. It was warm and sunny and his secretary had a view of the Hollywood sign right out her window. It was a day of talking: investors, the legal team and media. His secretary stayed on the line for his phone calls with reporters.

The JC outfit is composed of "some young just-out-of-college types, a whole technical team led by some experienced web developers and a very good legal team, including a brilliant Internet law expert," Ivester says. No other Duke grads, just people Ivester's met along the way.

JuicyCampus started with seven schools, Duke among the earliest installments. On October 24, the site went live, but the idea was hatched much earlier. "Several months before the launch, we basically thought it was a brilliant idea that had a lot of potential. We took it to private investors: they got it right away and thought it was worth taking some risk on," Ivester says.

JuicyCampus perhaps reached a crescendo-at least at Duke-during the January fraternity and sorority rush season. Having taken up greek life as a favorite topic in the fall, JC became a reference book for both the organizations and their potential members. But despite the grievances of maligned reputations on an individual level, Duke has kept its collective cool. At least compared to some of the other schools.

Over winter break, while media beyond university newspapers began to take note of JuicyCampus (Newsweek and The Chronicle of Higher Education, both in December), the website began working on its January push. Likely because of increased publicity (and perhaps even on account of that greek-rush focus), the site crashed on January 27. There were so many visitors that they were forced to take it down. Two days later, on January 29, the site expanded to 50 new campuses, octupling its reach overnight.

With the new campuses came the updated flurry of newspaper clips. Prior to February's national exposure, the pattern went something like this: a university newspaper ran a story about a goofy new web forum where students could dish about professors, classes, and other humorous aspects of college life. Those stories can't always be faulted for being na've, though, especially when Ivester is in there, as he was in The Cornell Daily Sun on Jan. 25, saying, "Basically, we thought back to when we were in college, remembered all the ridiculous things we did and the hilarious stories, and we created a place where students could share those stories." Sound familiar? Following the first news story, some columnist comes out calling JuicyCampus a plague of society. And then later, another news piece reports the animosity, disgust, and mounting resistance at the university. It doesn't take long for schools to simultaneously indulge in and condemn the JuicyCampus offering.

At Pepperdine University-one of the schools added in the January wave-the student body voted to place a campus-wide ban on the website. Andy Canales, leader of the student government, was quoted in a Feb. 17 Associated Press story: "It is an expression from our student body that we don't want this junk in our community." Since then, several schools have followed suit in formal attempts toward-or at least heated debates over-a ban or collective boycott of the site.

At Duke, while any significant effort to boot JC off campus is yet to be in the works, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta has said the school asked Ivester to consider "moderating the venom or at least moderating the opportunity for venom." Ivester's response: no dice.

"College students are clever and fun-loving, and we wanted to create a place where they could share their stories," Ivester said. But then, he addressed the plea for moderation: "Like anything that is even remotely controversial, there are always people who demand censorship.... However, we believe that JuicyCampus can have a really positive impact on college campuses, as a place for both entertainment and free expression. Frankly, we're surprised that any college administration would be against the free exchange of ideas."

You see, the JC administrators take a laissez-faire approach to web moderation. The ideal-again, that hilarious, fun-loving webspace that pervades Ivester's publicity spiel-is to leave just about everything up. But here's the rub: Ivester's JuicyCampus is not the JuicyCampus that exists. Not the one you visit to read about private truths, public lies and all the ugly things in between. Where there's dissonance between the rhetoric of the leader and the true materialization of those notions, there is trouble.

Among the early seven JuiCy campus

guinea pigs was Loyola Marymount University. Just before heading into first semester finals, a senior at LMU hopped on to the forum and posted something that school officials took seriously: a threat to shoot and kill as many people as possible on campus before being killed by police himself. Within an hour, the "anonymous" poster had been identified and arrested.

Threats of this magnitude seem to draw vastly more attention than lewd gossip. In early March, a Colgate University junior was arrested after he was traced to a post that pondered whether one could get classes canceled by starting a shooting spree-an incident that prompted more anonymity questions.

If you haven't put it together by now, JuicyCampus only works because Ivester guarantees you anonymity. Under the site's Privacy and Tracking Policy, three claims are made: 1) It is not possible for anyone to use this website to find out who you are or where you are located; 2) We do not collect any information directly from you. You've never given us your name or e-mail address, and we don't want it; 3) We do not track any information that can be used by us to identify you. According to the privacy page, while JC logs the numeric Internet protocol (IP) addresses of its users, it does not associate those addresses with specific posts-so long as you disable cookies on your browser. This distinguishes JC from standard social networking sites.

But how then does the student who made the threat at LMU get found out so quickly? To answer this question, let's track a series of JC responses to concerns about anonymity. In that January Cornell Daily Sun story, Ivester said, "We have no idea who is posting on our site. And unless Jack Bauer, or someone like him, was helping us, I can't think of any way for us to figure it out."

This answer came nearly seven weeks after the JuicyCampus blog, juicycampus.blogspot.com, which is run by JC's administrators, posted this response to a claim that behavior on JC is traceable: "Uhhhh duh? Everything you do on the Internet is traceable as long as you're using a private computer. This is especially true for college networks where they log who is plugged into each network outlet and have your unique network card address.... Nothing is anonymous on the internet." And in response to the Loyola Marymount incident: "As for the dumbass who posted the message that has garnered so much attention on CNN... he deserved what he got. Do you really think JuicyCampus is going to stand up to the police on privacy issues, compromise their web site, and defend a student like that? Pshhhhh.... You shouldn't have anything to worry about, unless you've got something to hide! :)."

Never mind the emoticon for a second. Here's the best part of that post: "If your school calls upset about some girl being called a slut, we're not handing over access to our server data. If the LAPD calls telling us there is a shooting threat, you better believe we're gonna help them.."

Then, flash forward to early February, when Ivester was talking to Towerview, and this is what he had to say about the LMU matter: "I'm not sure how it got to the University or the police. I assume the student told the University, the University then contacted the police, they increased security on campus, and the police were very dedicated to find out.. We were cooperative with them and JuicyCampus is not a place for people to do illegal things, or certainly not to threaten to kill people.. I'm not sure how they tracked down the student. A team of Internet forensic scientists can do amazing things."

Again, there's the great question: the clash between privacy and free speech. It's strange, but people are still getting used to the fact that things on the Internet don't exactly go away. Not like a funny story or a whispered secret.

Daniel Solove, a law professor at The George Washington University, wrote all about this stuff in a book called, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. As Solove points out, the Internet is "a digital rap sheet that can never be expunged." And under U.S. law, sites like JuicyCampus generally carry little responsibility for the posts on their webspace. In the Feb. 17 AP story, Solove said, it's one thing to protect the owner of a Web site when someone posts a defamatory message unbeknownst to the operation but something entirely different when sites, like JuicyCampus, "exist solely to propagate gossip."

Stuart Benjamin, a professor at the Duke School of Law, explains that "the Internet changes the level of damages" in a potential lawsuit. "If I write a letter and I send that letter to a few friends and it says you have herpes, I have libeled you, but the damages are low, because it's only a few people. On the Internet, if I post something [that is libelous], there could be 10,000 people that see it, so the damages go up considerably."

When it comes to defamation lawsuits, audience size matters. Here's a quick refresher on the legal context of libel. Libel is a tort that considers harmful statements in a fixed medium-especially writing-to be illegal. It is fairly commonly understood that with free speech, there is hardly anything that you can't say. Public figures will almost certainly fail to be granted damages for libel, defamation or emotional stress unless exceptionally high standards are met: the accused must know that a statement is false, and then they must recklessly intend to spread the false claim. Private citizens have a greater ability to bring suits, but it is extremely difficult to prove that statements are false and not intended to be jokes.

Within Ivester and the rest of the JuicyCampus team, knowledge of the existence of posts is rather insignificant. Because they have presumably disengaged their server from the information collection that is standard for social networking sites, they have made it more difficult to be implicated in any serious charges.

It's sort of like this: say you put a note on your front door that says anyone can stay at your house so long as they don't do anything illegal. Say the squatters throw a masquerade party and a fight breaks out and someone gets hurt. But you're out of town (you're always out of town), and you don't know who was in your apartment. You don't have their phone numbers or their e-mail addresses, and worst of all, the person who got hurt can't even identify the culprit-they all had masks on, remember? What can you, the owner of the apartment, do except say the apartment was just meant for a place to crash, a kind gesture, a helping humanitarian hand? Good, clean fun, right?

JuicyCampus is sort of like that. Only, just like Ivester suspects, the police have a way of stripping partygoers of their masks. Kevin Miller of Duke's Office of Information Technology breaks down the complex "anonymity" myth. "We have the capability internally to identify where an IP address is being used... and in some cases, directly or indirectly, we can determine who the person is," he says. "But one of [OIT's] core principles is that we don't, as a rule, disclose user information or identity from the IP address to anyone. Of course if someone comes to us with a subpoena or court order-like when we get a request from the MPAA or RIAA-we forward messages on, but we still don't respond with the user info."

When someone installs a web server, they will, by default, have logs of who performs every action on the website. Every time a visitor clicks a link on a website, that action is logged. A site like JC could very well change that default-or request users to disable cookies on their browser-so that the site wouldn't have that information.

But this policy puts JC at the center of the very charges made by the Attorneys General of New Jersey and Connecticut. The investigation is attempting to determine, with greater clarity, the extent to which JC keeps records. Ivester has recently said that he would turn over IP addresses if he were subpoenaed, but whether or not authorities could connect those addresses to specific posts is yet to be seen.

Ivester places an extraordinary amount of faith in the legal blockades his team of lawyers has erected. "Most of our legal advice was before we went live," he said in February. "To make sure we weren't going to run into issues. To make sure we weren't going to be liable.. And we haven't had many huge obstacles so far."

One reason JuicyCampus is able to operate under this protective legal veil is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act-which courts have interpreted broadly, shielding site operators who don't get involved with significantly moderating, editing, or otherwise processing the content.

There's a case in the courts currently that takes up similar matters. AutoAdmit, a sort of precursor to JuicyCampus, focuses on, among other things, admission to and life at law school. Though non-gossip topics were originally at the forum's core, AutoAdmit slowly adapted to the true interests of its posters: rumor and defamation and juiciness.

Two female Yale Law students have brought a case against anonymous posters on AutoAdmit in a defamation lawsuit, and several experts feel that there is a strong chance that the Connecticut federal courts, in which the case is under review, could move to uncover the identities of the 39 anonymous defendants. With a potential legal precedent like this, one can only imagine that Ivester and company are feeling the pressure. As Benjamin puts it, "I do forsee the same thing happening as happened to AutoAdmit. I think if [JuicyCampus] really has a policy that you can post anything, then they are setting themselves up in the long-term for trouble."

For the first time-on February 29-roughly a month before the legal investigations began, Ivester crafted a mass-address to his JC populous. In it, there is a sense of genuine let-down and frustration. One can't help but wonder whether the idealist rhetoric spouted by Ivester over the last several months, is, in fact, how he truly thinks about the site. The letter begins: "Thanks so much for your support over the past few months! We've grown bigger and faster than we ever expected, and we owe it all to you. You've posted thousands and thousands of messages spanning a whole wide range of juicy topics. There are hilarious posts about drunken antics, helpful posts about classes and professors, and thought-provoking posts about race, gender and sexuality. As you know, the site is pretty entertaining now!"

And then, the digression: "Unfortunately, it hasn't all been fun and games. Some of the things that have been posted have been mean-spirited, and we have received e-mails from people claiming to have been defamed on the site. Our hope for the site has always been that JuicyCampus would be a place for fun, lighthearted gossip, rather than a place to tear down people or groups. We want you to make JuicyCampus Juicy, not hateful. So, we appeal to you to keep JuicyCampus the fun place that it was meant to be. Please consider whether your post is entertaining or just mean, and whether using a person's full name really adds value, or if it would be just as juicy as a blind item. Remember that words can hurt, and the people you are talking about are real."

A month later, JC posted another letter, this time in defense of their practices with regard to the legal investigation. The statement concludes: "We consider the Attorneys General's conduct to constitute a heavy-handed attempt to ignore the clear direction established by Congress and the Courts and interfere with the free-speech rights of our users. We hope people will contact the Attorneys General of New Jersey and Connecticut to protest this waste of government resources."

No more emoticons. All so serious, all of a sudden.