ACB EXPOSED!!! by Time magazine

Very mainstream news organization TIME magazine has published an article about CollegeACB, the enfant terrible masterminded by our own Peter Frank ’12 from his dorm room.

If you remember, last year Frank bought gossip website Juicycampus and expanded his Anonymous Confession Board empire to 500 schools. Wesleyan’s is the most heavily frequented, and according to TIME, the site now gets up to 480,000 hits per day.

Watch this excellent video about CollegeACB’s impact on the Wesleyan campus. The music really defines how I feel when gossiping anonymously:

As in the Argus article about him last semester, Frank comports himself well in the interview and claims that he just wants to provide a forum for campus discussion, not encourage malicious gossip or turn a profit:

The 19-year-old English major defends the site as a “student-controlled discussion space where the communities dictate what’s talked about.” Though the site does not “call for salacious gossip,” he says, on a busy day he receives 40 requests to take down posts and “on a bad day, just a couple.”

He does not have moderators or police the site. But he follows up on complaints about individual posts. “If it says your name, we’ll take it off,” he says.

Hundreds of individuals and several schools have sent Frank requests to delete comments or even to remove a college from his site. For example, Washington and Lee University asked him in October to delete almost all threads about the school, but Frank refused. “I am not looking out for the school’s best interests,” he says. “I’m looking out for the students’ best interests.”

The administration is well aware of the ACB’s existence, but isn’t going to do much about it:

Even at Wesleyan, administrators have to tread lightly. The school told Frank he could not use its servers for his business, but, says director of media relations David Pesci, “We have other students who are entrepreneurs on campus who have businesses, and quite frankly, as long as they are conducting those businesses within the laws assigned to those areas, there’s not much that we can get involved with.”

So far at least, the law is on Frank’s side.

Frank seems to be unfazed by the pressure:

“It’s true that the actual authors would potentially be liable for posting libel,” Frank says of ACB. “But libel is difficult to prove. I just really don’t see it happening, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” And what about Frank? “I’m untouchable,” he says.

Strong words.

Has the shit hit the fan with this media exposure? What will come of this? Gawker excerpts of our ACB dirty laundry? A tamer, more thoroughly policed anonymous confession board? A self-imposed crackdown? Who are the freshman sluts? Is **** *** ’12 gay? Is anyone down for an orgy in the Olin stacks? Only time will tell.

Argus: Freshman Develops CollegeACB Empire
TIME: Anonymous Gossip Sites