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Wednesday, January 24, 2024

There's always something...

Remember Yik Yak, an anonymous social media posting site aimed at college students that (inevitably, it seems) ended up with hate speech, etc. Now we have a relatively new one in the news - Sidechat. From Inside Higher Ed today:

Harvard University has asked the leaders of a social media app that allows anonymous posting to tamp down on “concerning content” following student complaints of antisemitic messages. University officials met with the app Sidechat’s team this month, asking them to do more to monitor and moderate content, Harvard said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. Sidechat assured Harvard that it will monitor posts to ensure they follow its terms of use and community guidelines. The move comes only weeks after Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned in the wake of a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on antisemitism in higher education.

Sidechat has played a role in the recent tensions over antisemitism at Harvard. In a Jan. 9 letter, Virginia Foxx, Republican chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, pointed out Sidechat’s potentially problematic posts. She requested that Harvard produce posts “by Harvard students, faculty, staff, and other Harvard affiliates on Sidechat and other social media platforms targeting Jews, Israelis, Israel, Zionists, or Zionism.” Sidechat co-founder Sebastian Gil said in an email that Harvard is the only university to ask the app to increase its moderation. He said his company does “more than most (if not all) social media apps in moderation,” pointing to a moderation team of 30 employees and the company’s use of machine learning models to “detect bigotry.” ...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/2024/01/24/harvard-seeks-oversight-sidechat-app-after-antisemitic-posts.

No, yours truly has not downloaded Sidechat and joined whatever there is for UCLA. Yik Yak was sufficient, back in the day, to tell him the answer to "What could possibly go wrong?"

Note: The image above is from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/style/sidechat-app-college.html.

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