Iv y idiots are just the latest to feel the by te
‘H ARVARD Memes for Horny Bourgeois Teens” was the name, at one point, for a private Facebook group founded by incoming students last December. “General F--kups” was another, proved all too apt as at least 10 members’ admissions have been formally rescinded.
According to The Harvard Crimson, the memes mocked the Holocaust, implied that child abuse was a sexual turn-on and that children in the Middle East love bestiality, and referred to the hanging of a young Mexican as “piñata time.”
“This was a ‘just-because-we-got-into-Harvard-doesn’t-mean-we-can’t-have-fun’ kind of thing,” incoming student Cassandra Luca told the Crimson.
In the short time since this became public — Harvard revoked the admissions in April — the debate has focused less on the memes than the punishment. Detractors point to Harvard President Drew Faust’s commencement speech in May, in which she spoke of free speech.
“If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced, or even prosecuted,” she said, “who is to decide which words?”
“Punishing students for their political views or their personal values is a serious mistake,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz told The Boston Globe, adding that he had not seen the memes. “These actions are not consistent with the spirit of the First Amendment.”
What is clear is these students be- lieved participating in a Facebook chat afforded them some protection, a shockingly naive assumption.
“There’s virtually no distinction anymore between your physical self and online self,” says Markus Giesler, associate professor of marketing at York University in Toronto and an expert in online communications. “It’s important to remember that what we say online is publicly accessible and held to a moral standard.”
Giesler thinks there’s also a sociological component at play here, and Whitney M. Phillips, co-author of the forthcoming book “The Ambivalent Internet,” agrees. “I’m certainly not apologizing for these kids — they knew full well what they were doing,” she says. Phillips believes they understood the melding of on- and offline existence, “but what can override that is performing for a like-minded audience. They all want other people to think they can hang — that they’re cool, they get it, they’re in on the joke. It’s a prosocial impulse. They’re just not thinking about any moment beyond this particular performance.”
That these students sought the approbation of others who found jokes about child abuse and the Holocaust funny, however, left Harvard with no choice. The damage to its brand could have been incalculable.
Gen X’ers were the last to know a world before and after the Internet; generations raised with screens might regard them as a prophylactic that allows for any behavior or utterance, no matter how vile. Apps like Snapchat can further the misguided notion that you can somehow vaporize photos or comments from the cloud forever. You can’t. Anthony Weiner, it seems, has taught us nothing.
“I might have successfully whistled past the graveyard here,” he said in 2013, running for mayor of New York, trailed by a documentary crew. Weiner, forced to resign from Congress in 2011 after his rabid sexting habit became public, had successfully excused his behavior as digital deviance, nothing more: He’d never physically cheated on wife Huma Abedin, never met in person any of the women in question, was guilty only of trying to feed his sad, bottomless pit of narcissistic need.
Last month, after taking a plea in federal court over sexts exchanged with a 15-year-old girl, Weiner was ordered to register as a sex offender and face up to 27 months in prison. Finally moved to tears at the confiscation of his iPhone, Weiner admitted in open court that his behavior was “as morally wrong as it was unlawful.”
In March, a congressional subcommittee pressured the military to crack down on pornographic images shared online, arguing that such activity silently, purposefully bleeds offline. “This is about service members deliberately trying to degrade, humiliate and threaten fellow service members,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif ). “They encouraged stalking, distributed stolen intimate photos, and have reduced their comrades to a collection of body parts.”
More than 30 states have laws against revenge porn; last year, Speier introduced a bill seeking to federalize the crime. Facebook, Google, Reddit and Twitter all have policies against it. The ability to anonymously terrorize a target is why schools wrestle with cyberbullying, why intelligence agencies track self-identified terrorists online.
We long ago disabused ourselves of the notion that online identities are mere avatars, our better or worst selves on display.
It is, of course, impossible to know what lurks in the minds of Harvard’s now-rejected students, but it’s possible to know poor judgment. As one thread member lamented, a little too late: “I done f--ked up.”