Anonymous Facebook confession pages can be both terrifying and touching. A glimpse at what it means to be young in 2013.
Via: facebook.com
Teenagers across the country are dishing all about what's happening at their high schools — spreading rumors, talking behind one another's backs. But they're not just doing it in the hall, or over text message. They're doing it on Facebook "confession pages" that are unofficially linked to their schools.
The Facebook confession page trend is spreading across the country. Think Gossip Girl but open to all. "Everyone posts so much about themselves. It is sort of disturbing, borderline creepy, but sickly entertaining," one student at a high school in Silicon Valley, told me.
Here's how it works: An admin sets up page with a link to a Survey Monkey page or a Google Doc, where people can submit confessions anonymously. In true Gossip Girl style, no one knows who the admin is, and the admin doesn't know who sends in the posts. Comments and "likes" are often linked to real identities, but there's an option to submit anonymous responses as well.
Via: docs.google.com
The large majority of posts are innocuous confessions about crushes — a sort of high school version of Craigslist's Missed Connections. There's also plenty of venting about "fake" friends, popular kids, guys being gross, girls dressing sluttily, and school generally sucking. But it gets dark too: There are confessions about cheating on girlfriends, having sex on campus, doing drugs, or cheating on tests. Gossip can quickly go viral. And real identities can be exposed, either directly or though thinly disguised descriptions.
Confession boxes and anonymous posts have long been a fixture on Tumblr, but seeing these things on Facebook, connected to specific schools, with the names of real students in the comment sections, makes the gossip more tantalizing (and, for participants, raises the stakes). It's anonymous, but within a clear context of reality.
