You probably have seen all over Facebook recently, the spotted pages which are based on things such as different places like the university halls or campus, a gym, a shopping centre, anything! So, what I would like to write about is whether these things are good or bad and whether they should be banned or taken down. Are these pages harmful or harmless?
The basic idea of these pages is that you click the like button on the page, and if you fancy it. You can write an anonymous message to someone, or about someone and you send them in via the Facebook message. The mediators of this page then post whatever you have written anonymously for whoever has liked the page – to see it.
So what I wanted to write about is why I, personally, hate these pages.I don’t know about anyone else who sometimes likes to walk to the shop in their pajamas with their hair greasy and messy but I quite like to do it without people commenting on it on Facebook, anonymously. It is more than uncomfortable and it makes me feel like I cannot go to the gym without people looking at me or maybe writing something on one of these pages about the way I looked or acted. Aberdeen University even has one about the library – which started off quite funny, and cute with people writing things that they were too shy to say to someone’s face, including light hearted flirtation but this escalated to things such as asking to meet in the toilets, which is definitely more than inappropriate to be posting on a public page on Facebook, I turned against the idea of this pages.
These pages started to get worse, and in the end, the ones based around my university were taken down by University officials. But these were of course back up and running in weeks, with 1,800 likes on one of them and the same inappropriate comments were being posted online within a matter of days.
Now, it could be argued that these pages were good at getting people’s comments out there; the shy people who always wanted to speak to someone they never had the guts to speak to face to face.
Our university newspaper published an article on this issue in which they stated that they should be shut down and have been encouraging students ‘to be more professional on the internet after web pages’ such as these spotted pages ‘were used for bullying’.
A student commented on the recent revival of the ‘‘Spotted: Aberdeen University Library’’ page: “Just when I felt safe from public ridicule. I guess I will have to start washing and dressing up to go to the fricking library again”.
These pages are not the first of their sort. ‘‘Aberdeen University Confessions’’ went viral in October 2012 and the stories shared were reported as offensive by many students.Allegations of sexual assault posted on the page led to police involvement and the administrators of the page eventually agreed to deactivate it.
Some people from the University of Aberdeen have suggested that these pages should be removed, and should not be allowed to be used in the public domain they are considered harmless sometimes but more often than not there is something on these pages that does offend someone somewhere and it would be useful to remove these things for fear of something escalating into something more serious. It has been suggested that these websites could eventually have the same effect as some troll websites have had, resulting in the administrators serving prison sentences which I’m sure is not what people want for University Students.
