Oliver Johnson
When the Los Angeles Police Department officers in riot gear arrived at the University of California, Los Angeles, on Thursday, the anonymous messaging app Sidechat filled with posts trying to understand what was going on: “Is everyone okay? I just heard about 8 police cars driving by,” one post read. Others shared rumors about police actions and outside agitators and forwarded live streams to students to watch events unfold.
Sidechat has taken on a new role on college campuses as pro-Palestinian demonstrations and authorities’ response to them has increased in recent weeks. Posts on the app are anonymous, allowing students to share opinions and updates freely in a way they often can’t on other platforms. But Sidechat’s anonymous nature has also fueled hateful rhetoric, college administrators say, raising questions about its role in spreading division on campuses.
What is Sidechat?
The app was launched in 2021 and marketed to college students as a digital space to speak authentically about campus life. Students log in with their university email addresses to access closed groups specific to each school – similar to Facebook when it started as a platform just for students with “.edu” addresses.
But 20 years after Facebook’s launch, students today navigate a much more complex digital landscape, fraught with concerns about online privacy. Just as protesters wear masks and scarves to hide their identities at protests, anonymous apps like Sidechat offer protection to posters who share opinions on controversial topics without having their name or even username attached to their posts.
Sidechat resembles a previously popular anonymous app called Yik Yak, which launched in 2013 and allowed users to see posts from people within a 5-mile radius. The application was banned from at least half a dozen campuses following concerns about bullying and harassment on the platform. Side chat acquired Yik Yak in 2023. Fizz, another anonymous app founded a year before Sidechat, also gained popularity on college campuses.
Fear, frustration and tension as protests grow
CBS News analyzed Sidechat conversations at five schools where pro-Palestinian protests took place: Columbia, Harvard, University of Texas at Austin, UCLA and New York University. While some posts called on students to join the protests, others criticized them for disrupting campus life.
However, criticism of the police presence and the university’s response united many students. At Columbia, students expressed anger and dismay at the university’s decision to call the New York Police Department on Tuesday to break up the encampment and clear Hamilton Hall, where some protesters had barricaded themselves. A video of a protester falling down the stairs in front of Hamilton Hall was upvoted more than 1,600 times, while posters alleged police used excessive force.
Posts on some university Sidechat groups said students were struggling to focus on exams during the protests. A post on the UT Austin chat said, “All of this is very distracting for people and I think everyone deserves a turn in the finals.”
CBS News
CBS News
Hate allegations on the platform
Sidechat’s anonymous nature allowed harassment and intimidation, college administrators and lawmakers said. The app has come under scrutiny by the House Education and Workforce Committee in its ongoing investigations into how Columbia, Harvard and other universities have handled alleged incidents of anti-Semitism.
On April 17th hearing with the committee, Columbia President Minouche Shafik said that Sidechat was “poisonous” and that “probably the most egregious cases we have seen of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and racist comments have occurred on social media in these anonymous channels.”
In February, a 114 pages legal complaint filed on behalf of Jewish students at Columbia alleged that Sidechat was used to harass a Jewish student who had removed a political pamphlet from a dorm hallway. Sidechat users shared the location of their dorm and encouraged students to vandalize their space, the lawsuit says.
In January, Harvard asked Sidechat do more to monitor “relative content” in your school group. According to Inside Higher Education, Sidechat assured the school that it would moderate posts to ensure community guidelines were not violated.
CBS News found several posts in college chats that used aggressive or obscene language to describe protesters on both sides of the issue.
This week, posts and comments on Harvard chat denied or downplayed the notion that Jewish students might feel unsafe on campus. In a group chat on UCLA Sidechat, one student wrote that the protesters were “indoctrinated sheep,” while another posted that he “wishes nothing but the worst for the people at the camp.” Posters at the UT Austin forum hurled similar insults at people who participated in the protests.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has also seen protests related to the Israel-Hamas war, completely blocked access to Sidechat and similar anonymous messaging apps on its campus Wi-Fi after the president said in February that the apps ” showed a reckless disregard for the well-being of young people and a complete indifference to bullying.”
Sidechat co-founder Sebastian Gil did not respond to an interview request. Gil told USA today As of March, Sidechat has a team of 30 content moderators who review and remove posts that violate its terms of use against threatening, offensive or profane content. The app also warns users that posts containing student names will be deleted.
Jui Sarwate contributed to this report.
