“It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt,” said Tracy Scherdt, a junior at Community High School, and a subject of a recent post on the page. “[Being posted about] weirded me out, because I’d never really participated in it, and so to read about myself on something I wasn’t aware of was a very weird thing.”
It was started on April 11, 2013 by a group of anonymous students. The page is a place where students submit “confessions” anonymously and then the page’s administrators filter and post them. The whole idea for the Twitter page is based off of the original Facebook confessions page that was made first. These pages are all over social media websites catering to many different schools, and they are all anonymously run. The admins thought that the Facebook confessions weren’t pulling in enough interest from the high school students. “We basically took that [the Facebook confessions page] and we re-amped it and made it more fun…we figured everyone else would like it if it was on Twitter,” said an admin.
Though for the readers the confessions can be fun to read, for the admins themselves, running the page can be very time consuming and even stressful. “It’s kind of like a job basically,” one of the admins explained. They say that the page is actually a lot of fun to be running but also overwhelming at times. Another admin added, “It is kind of time draining…it’s hard to finish your homework because you feel like you have an obligation to the followers to keep putting [confessions] up.”
In addition to taking up time, the admins feel that they have to lie to their friends to keep the page anonymous. “I feel like I’ve had to shut off a lot of people. A lot of people will confront me about it and I’ve had to lie to them about it,” said one admin. “It’s more fun not to know; the magic is in the mystery,” explained another admin.
Anyone can submit a confession anonymously to a google document, and the administrators post them completely anonymously, which means they don’t know who wrote what. This being said, anyone can be posted about. For some people who are constantly being complemented through confessions, this is a confidence booster. “People are becoming more aware of what people think of them… I think that’s good in a way,” Milo Tucker-Meyer, a Community High Freshman explained. Many people receive compliments which can boost one’s self-esteem, but that isn’t always the case. “I see some that are put-downs and that’s not cool,” said Trey Sarmento, a junior at Community High School.
The admins are fully aware that the risk of severely hurting someone’s feelings is present through posting confessions anonymously. In order to keep the public happy, they do their best to filter and delete the offensive tweets. As one of the admins explains, ”If someone is offended by it, we tell people to respond and we’ll delete it. It’s not that big of a deal.” Though this works for the admins, many people can still be offended by things that others don’t see as an issue.
Billie Ochberg, a social worker, says that the comments aren’t always taken so lightly. “Anything anonymous runs the risk of offending people,” she said. “You have to be brave enough to put your real name [behind it].” With people hiding behind a screen and not needing to put their name behind their comment, it gives the opportunity for anything to be said, even rude comments. This is a big part of the page because it adds a sense of mystery and anonymity, but there is a balance, and everyone needs to be careful when participating in something like this.
