Out of Juice?

Now that three weeks have gone by since Student Council passed their resolution regarding the gossip site juicycampus.com, I thought I'd try to see if anything came of it.

Unsurprisingly, Juicy Campus and Facebook have yet to modify their behavior in response to Council's requests. In an email, College Rep. Sam Davies, who sponsored the bill, said:

We sent letters to Juicy Campus and Facebook respectively, including our formal resolution and voicing our opinions on what should be done. Juicy Campus had no interest in speaking with us, but Facebook did reply and let us know that they will be meeting to discuss advertising for Juicy Campus, but are not at liberty to give us any specifics.

Facebook did not respond to my inquiry on Council's request. For the moment, they are still running Juicy Campus's ads, such as those pictured below, and they seem to come up quite frequently.

The actual impact on students is harder to measure. Asked about the resolution's success in this regard, Davies said it was "hard to say" but still thought the bill generated "positive effects." In an interview, Council President Matt Schrimper was also upbeat. Schrimper told me that since the resolution's passage many student organizations, prominently including the IFC and ISC, had made appeals to their members to stop using the site. Rather than directing the effort, he said, Council had acted as an "umbrella overseeing the different responses" and helping groups to "frame the debate in terms of our larger community of honor and trust." While he too conceded he had little idea exactly what kind of effect the actions had produced on student behavior, he said he was all in all "quite pleased with Council's response."

Curious, I decided to produce a snapshot of Juicy Campus usage between now and when Council passed their resolution. On Tuesday, March 25, the day they passed the bill, the UVa portion of juicycampus.com had 24 posts with a combined 8,386 views (that's views of individual posts, not of the whole site itself). Yesterday, Wednesday, April 16, there were 21 posts with a combined 14, 612 views.

It should be noted that this analysis is completely unscientific, as one or either of these days could be outliers. But for what it's worth, the snapshot gives little indication Juicy Campus usage is falling away.