Adyant Kanakamedala

The Promontory Point on a winter night.

Sidechat, the anonymous social media platform used by many students, became a hub for campaigning during last month’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) elections. Much to many users’ annoyance, the platform was flooded with posts supporting and criticizing the various parties, highlighting both Sidechat’s susceptibility to manipulation and its limits as a space for truly free expression on campus.

Several users speculated during the election that the New Generation Party (NGP) was manipulating the platform by coordinating to mass downvote posts critical of it in order to trigger Sidechat’s automatic post removal feature (posts are automatically removed when they reach negative five karma). But my suspicions of manipulation did not stop when voting closed.

On April 25, the day after the election ended, I took a photo of the view from Promontory Point and posted it with the caption, “Which one of you chuds ate downtown Chicago.” (The skyline is usually visible from that angle, but the fog had obscured it that day.)

One hour after its initial posting, an anonymous user commented, “Core party pres,” implying that Kevin Guo—who had been elected USG president the day before under the CORE Collective banner—was the culprit.

In just four minutes, the comment gained 24 likes, an abnormally high rate that quickly dropped off despite my post’s continued popularity.

Roughly 24 hours after the initial picture from the Point had been posted, I shared a screenshot of the comment, suggesting it could be evidence that the NGP was trying to sway student opinion, though the election had concluded by then. Almost immediately afterwards, my original Point post was taken down because it had been reported by multiple users for violating community guidelines, triggering Sidechat’s automatic removal system. I was also placed in “time-out” by Sidechat for 24 hours.

While one can debate whether or not my Point post was actually funny, it is inarguable that it did not violate Sidechat’s community guidelines. It therefore seems clear that the reporting of the original post was somehow linked to my criticizing the NGP in the follow-up post.

It seems likely, then, that the NGP coordinated efforts to mass upvote, mass downvote, and mass report. A widely circulated, though unverified, WhatsApp thread shows NGP presidential candidate Will Moller describing Sidechat as a “battlefield” and instructing a group of his supporters to “wage a campaign” on the platform by posting positive things about him, further supporting this hypothesis.

The utility of continuing this “campaign” is much less clear now that Moller and the NGP have lost the election. But regardless of whether Moller, NGP leadership, or even NGP voters were involved in this episode, the fact that it is possible for Sidechat to become a battlefield for public manipulation is deeply concerning. If the manipulators in this case were not directly associated with the NGP, then the attempts at manipulation may have been even more widespread, which is all the more concerning. Sidechat is rife with opportunities to influence both what people see and what they don’t. Tools for a group of students to quell the free speech of others and artificially promote their own are readily available.

UChicago’s Sidechat community could be changed to help limit the effectiveness of manipulation. The five-downvote rule for automatically removing posts could be changed to allow posts with more downvotes to stay on the platform. Such a low barrier for automatic silencing of speech facilitates foul play; leave it to the user to decide if the value of their speech outweighs a barrage of downvotes. UChicago Crushes, another Sidechat community, allows for up to negative 25 karma before a post’s automatic removal; the main UChicago community operated under the same rules before the newer negative five limit.

Changing Sidechat’s mass reporting policy might be more difficult. Automatically removing posts reported by multiple users, even without moderator input, has its benefits—if a post doxxes a student, it should be removed as quickly as possible, and Sidechat is unlikely to change a policy intended to protect students. The alternative would require employing real people to confirm whether a post violates its guidelines either before or after taking it down. But the current situation is untenable—when posts and users are flagged unfairly, Sidechat does not even have clear appeals processes for users who have been banned or had their accounts put in “time-out.”

But the University community does not need to rely on the company behind Sidechat to provide an online public forum. The University funds two programs—the Parrhesia Program for Public Thinking and Discourse and the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression—for the sole purpose of furthering public discourse and expression. Together, their budgets total hundreds of millions of dollars. Either of them has the means to implement an app with the functionality of Sidechat where silencing speech is more difficult and manipulation is more readily detected and discarded.

The significance of these attempts at manipulation lies not in the USG election or in the attempted bullying campaign afterwards. The electorate was insufficiently manipulated. The CORE Collective won. Sidechat, however, is vulnerable. Perception can be easily manipulated, and evidence easily removed, by simply mass reporting an individual post.

It is not news that someone referred to a fellow student in an insulting way. Nor is it news that a middle-of-the-road joke I made on the platform is no longer there. Needing to curb my Sidechat posting addiction for 24 hours was at most a mild annoyance. However, Sidechat’s obvious exploitability is a threat to free expression in the campus community.

Isaac Crane is a third-year in the College and a senior Arts and Culture reporter at the Maroon.