Fabulous read about the impact of social media (the Age of Anxiety) on spiraling levels of depression and teen suicide. Strongly recommended reading.
Link to book
An Anonymous-Messaging App Upended a Vermont High School
An anonymous message board meant for school chatter quickly turned toxic
Hours after the Fizz app opened to Champlain Valley Union High School, complaints began.
Julie Jargon, WSJ
Updated June 8, 2024
An app lets high-schoolers post anonymously about their classmates, and police the rules themselves. I know what you’re thinking: What could possibly go wrong?
Fizz, a private message board for colleges and high schools, opened to students at Vermont’s largest high school in May. Within hours, posts went from jokes and memes to public shaming of students and speculation about teachers’ sex lives. It caused more havoc than the principal had seen in his nine years on the job.
The two Stanford University students who started the app call it “an uplifting digital space for Gen Z.” Instagram posts that advertised it to the 1,300 students at Champlain Valley Union High School described it as a place to share “anonymous CVU confessions and crushes.” The posts were harmless at first. Then things turned vicious.
Teens, posting anonymously, made comments speculating about classmates’ sexual orientation. They uploaded photos of students, mocking their appearance and disabilities. There were party photos, along with accusations that the people in them were drunk or high. Some posters insinuated that teachers and administrators were involved with each other or with students. Students could “upvote” posts to surface them higher on the feed, with the worst ones often rising to the top.
Fizz was all anyone talked about in the hallways and cafeteria. Students say they felt they had to keep checking the app in case something was posted about them.
“It was really chaotic. You started to feel like you couldn’t trust anyone,” says 15-year-old Lio Miller. Miller was in a Dungeons & Dragons club, and a Fizz user posted a yearbook photo of the members, calling the group “nasty.”
‘Shocked and dismayed’
Fizz is emerging when social media is under scrutiny for contributing to, if not causing, teen anxiety. Bullying and harassment on the app have occurred at various colleges, according to campus newspaper articles. It has drawn comparisons to Yik Yak, an app that shut down in 2017 because of bullying and threats on college campuses. (Yik Yak, now under new ownership, has guardrails to prevent harassment.) Some schools, such as the University of North Carolina, plan to block Yik Yak, Fizz and similar apps.
CVU students began reporting Fizz to school administrators within hours of its debut there. Principal Adam Bunting had previously dealt with the aftermath of Instagram “spill the tea” accounts and other forms of online bullying, but says Fizz was on a different level. Students went to guidance counselors’ offices in tears. Bunting says he had to persuade one distraught senior to finish the school year.
Even as the principal, I had a visceral response to seeing posts about myself. What does that feel like when you’re a
student and already struggling with how to fit in?’
—Adam Bunting, principal of
Champlain Valley Union High School
He asked CVU parents to contact Fizz Social, the app’s maker, and request that the school be removed from the app.
“I was shocked and dismayed by how quickly the app created harm,” says Bunting, who was himself the target of some posts.
‘Say anything you wanted’
Fizz was created in 2020 by Stanford students Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer, who wanted to connect students when Covid canceled in-person classes.
Solomon, now 22, says his peers have grown up showing curated versions of themselves on social media. Anonymity was key to offering a more authentic experience in which people could feel comfortable being vulnerable, he says. Each Fizz community is limited to students with email addresses associated with the school, similar to Facebook in its earliest days.
Rumors and bullying comments on Fizz led to widespread hurt at the Hinesburg, Vt., high school.
Fizz took off at Stanford, where Solomon says it has been well-received. He and Cofer dropped out to work full time on the app, which is at more than 240 colleges. They started rolling out Fizz to high schools in April, and it’s now at 60 of them. Solomon declined to share user numbers, but the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower says that Fizz has 113,000 monthly active users, more than double from a year ago, and that it has been downloaded 600,000 times.
Fizz’s CEO is Rakesh Mathur, an entrepreneur who helped it raise more than $40 million. The app is free to download and doesn’t make any money. Mathur says Fizz plans to run ads at some point.
Community guidelines forbid posting private information about users, as well as bullying, hate speech and obscene text or images. Rule-breakers can be banned.
At the same time, it’s a fine line since “jokes, memes, complaints and commentary around teachers and parents are allowed and expected,” according to Fizz’s website.
The app counts on users to police each other’s posts. Student volunteers who wish to become moderators have to undergo online training and ace quizzes. Fizz Social also employs a team of 12 trust-and-safety employees at its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters, to make the final call on flagged posts. And it says artificial intelligence removes about 75% of prohibited content before it gets posted.
It can’t be a real community if
everyone is anonymous.’
—Lio Miller, sophomore
CVU’s student moderators couldn’t keep up with how many posts they had to review, and all three—unknown to each other—had to agree that something broke the rules before taking action, Bunting says.
When 16-year-old student Zoe Epstein saw someone post that no one likes her, she reported it within the app and deleted Fizz. Moderators removed the post.
“If it wasn’t anonymous, people wouldn’t have posted those things,” Epstein says. “You could literally say anything you wanted and not get in trouble.”
‘Vermont was an outlier’
Solomon says a survey of Fizz users shows that 90% of high-school and college users report feeling more included and connected because of the app. He says that the company works to improve content moderation and that some of the bullying that was reported on college campuses occurred before Fizz had better AI filters.
“What happened at Vermont was an outlier,” Solomon says. “I view it as a learning opportunity.”
Students including Zoe Epstein and Gabriella Serafini felt they had to keep checking the app to see if they were the targets of anonymous posts.
After Fizz heard from upset parents and faculty at CVU, including a school-board member who is also a state representative, the company on May 7 agreed to temporarily remove the school from the app.
Fizz has shut down only one other community, a California high school where administrators complained about posts that targeted faculty, Solomon says.
Target of gossip
Solomon says many Vermont students were unhappy with the app shutdown, and his publicist shared screenshots from students who posted complaints about its being removed. Mathur says he hopes Fizz can return to CVU.
Other CVU students say they were relieved to see Fizz go.
Nikhil Blasius, student body co-president, says Fizz was never a way to build connections at the school. “It was advertised as a gossip app,” he says.
The only thing the app
created was harm.’
—Nikhil Blasius, senior
Gabriella Serafini was a target of gossip. Someone took a photo of her and her boyfriend from her boyfriend’s Instagram account and posted it to Fizz, along with speculation about what the couple did alone together.
Serafini, a 16-year-old, says she was shocked and hurt that an innocent moment captured on camera was posted and made into something it wasn’t.
She says she laughed when she first saw the jokes and memes on Fizz. It stopped being funny when it was about her. “No one can know how hurtful something is until they’re the one being hurt,” she said.
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