As if college students didn’t have enough Internet platforms on which to gossip, complain,… As if college students didn’t have enough Internet platforms on which to gossip, complain, defame and joke like junior high schoolers, a new website proves that the life-long traffic in rumor and ridicule will bear at least one more.

Pitt is now the newest member of JuicyCampus.com, a college campus gossip website. The website is an open forum that will allow the Pitt community to make anonymous posts about campus social life, academics and any other topic.

Founded by Duke University graduate Matt Ivester, the website has over 50 universities utilizing the discussion forums so far.

“Our idea was that some of the most hilarious and entertaining things in the world happen on college campuses, and JuicyCampus could be a place to share those stories,” Ivester said.

Beginning at Duke, the site quickly gained momentum, and as the numbers rose, so did the gossip.

The gossip ranges from funny to cruel, to desperate, defamatory and sometimes even intolerable.

Nevertheless, universities expressed interest and became a part of the JuicyCampus family.

Universities such as Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania are members of the site, along with Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Brown and Yale.

Samantha Ku, a sophomore at the University of Miami, said that it hasn’t gained much momentum at her school, but predicts it will.

“If people start to take it seriously, it will really take off,” she said. “People here have heard of it because it was advertised on Facebook.”

Danielle Cary, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, just discovered the site on Facebook through an advertisement, “Whitewater Just got Juicy.”

Currently, the most popular discussions have to do with fraternities and sororities.

“It’s going to make a different ball game than Facebook,” Pitt sophomore Katie Furlong said. “It could be used as a resource like Ratemyprofessors.com, but it could also perpetuate negative greek stereotypes because of its anonymity.”

Furlong, a member of the Delta Phi Epsilon sorority, feels that a site like this will change the tide in greek recruitment.

“It is going to definitely stack the playing fields,” she said. “I think it will give a certain incentive for greeks to start using the Internet as more of a tool to promote their organization.”

Besides greek life, other discussions include drug use at Cornell, sexual reputations at Duke, the “hottest girls” at Loyola Marymount and a few attempts at intelligent conversation.

“Some of the posts are hilarious. Others are thought provoking. And others are just stupid. But it’s all pretty entertaining, and I think that is why students are so attracted to it,” Ivester said.

Ivester also said that posts can be taken down by site administrators, though it is rare.

Other students see the addition of JuicyCampus to Pitt life as a potential problem.

“It just seems like it’s an extension of high school backtalking, mostly facilitated by the fact that it’s anonymous,” Pitt sophomore Evan Oare said.

The site’s anonymity is what the site prides itself on, and no matter how much scrutiny the site is under, Ivester and his company will be legally protected.

“The hosts or operators of a website are not legally liable for defamatory statements by posters to the site, or for invasions of privacy caused by statements made by posters. The operators are responsible legally for anything that they say or post themselves,” law professor Michael J. Madison, an expert on Internet law, said.

Only on a case-by-case basis can the operators of the site be legally ordered to give up the identities of posters writing defamatory statements, whether anonymously or under a pseudonym, Madison said.

“This is done by weighing the post’s first amendment interest in anonymity against the harm caused to the victim of the alleged defamation,” he added.

Only time will tell whether or not the site will begin to rival Facebook in popularity at Pitt and other campuses around the country.

“We would love to have as many users as Facebook. And if we keep growing at this rate, it won’t be long before we do,” Ivester said.

“I don’t think anything will ever really rival Facebook, or at least not for a long time until the Facebook generation moves on, just like MySpace is,” Oare said. “But, there could be some good in it, like for social networking.”

Currently there is one post for the University of Pittsburgh. Anyone is able to post, and according to the website, the site is “Always anonymous