By Richard Ballard
The latest from @gossipgirlcornell reads: “Cornell’s architects doing more blow than blueprints.” A few posts earlier: “Everyone whispers Aphi runs on snow, but word is the real blizzard’s at Chi Psi.” Outlandish? Probably. Anonymous? Always. And if you’re wondering where these snippets of campus chaos are coming from, the answer — more often than not — is Sidechat.
At Cornell, Sidechat has become more than just an app. It’s a moodboard for student life: part bulletin board, part burn book. It’s where complaints about TCAT delays meet hot takes on dining hall drama, where memes about academic burnout mix with wild (and occasionally libelous) commentary on Greek life. Students scroll between classes, post in the middle of the night and refresh constantly — not just for updates, but to feel like they’re in on the joke.
But lately, the stakes have changed. What began as a space for campus gossip has become a window into how universities handle speech, identity and accountability. Following congressional scrutiny of antisemitic content at schools like Columbia and Harvard, Sidechat’s role in fueling hate speech has come under national spotlight. What started as a digital campus quad is now part of a broader reckoning about free expression, institutional control and the limits of anonymity in a hyper-surveilled university ecosystem.
At elite schools like Cornell, students are constantly performing — in class, on LinkedIn, at networking events and club interviews. Sidechat is where that performance breaks. No real names, no résumés, no Ivy League polish. Just chaos, curated by the crowd.
The anonymity unlocks something students don’t always show elsewhere: brutal honesty, biting sarcasm and a certain kind of rawness that rarely makes it past the gatekeeping of “professionalism.” Take the posts speculating about the Slope Day artist — students debate who would be “big enough” to justify the wait, trading rumors and judgments with the confidence of booking agents. The joke works because the logic behind it is familiar: prestige matters here, and everyone knows how to size it up. Sidechat turns that instinct into content.
That’s what makes Sidechat revealing. For every joke about upstate New York’s twelve fake seasons, there’s a post spiraling into self-deprecation, burnout or brutal comparisons. Posts about friend groups, GPA gaps or who got cut from what club aren’t just gossip — they’re reflections of how tightly status, stress and identity are wound together here. Sidechat doesn’t create that pressure. It just surfaces it, unfiltered and unedited. It can sometimes be seen as just a meme dump, but also as a mirror. And sometimes, it’s a pretty dark one.
The appeal lies in anonymity. But that same feature is what makes it so difficult to regulate. While Cornell students joke about bus delays or club clout, the platform has also become a flashpoint in national conversations about antisemitism and institutional accountability. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, antisemitic posts surged on college campuses — and Sidechat was frequently named as one of the platforms where those sentiments took root. In testimony before Congress and media reports, lawmakers pointed to Sidechat as a space where hate could flourish under the radar. In response, the app’s leadership reportedly met with administrators at schools like Harvard and assured them that moderation policies were being “strictly enforced” sidechat article info.
But it’s unclear what “strictly enforced” means when no one knows who’s behind the posts. Sidechat claims to employ a 30-person moderation team and bans accounts after a single severe violation, yet students report seeing inflammatory content linger for hours — if not days — before removal. And since the app verifies users by school email but doesn’t display usernames, every post is understood to come from someone nearby, someone in your dorm or lecture hall or club GroupMe. That proximity is what makes the posts so gripping — and sometimes so cruel.
“Sidechat is where people say what they wish they could say out loud,” said a student in the Class of ’25, who requested anonymity due to the nature of their posts. “It’s not always good. But at least it’s honest. That’s kind of the point — Cornell students already censor themselves everywhere else.”
Sidechat isn’t just another app students cycle through — it’s embedded itself into how campus culture is communicated, criticized and reshaped. It reflects the absurdity, pressure and sometimes toxicity of elite college life, but it also exposes the gaps in how institutions respond to digital spaces they don’t control.
Cornell doesn’t have to control Sidechat, but it does have to reckon with it. The app now shapes how students experience campus life — not just socially, but emotionally, politically, even reputationally. That influence deserves attention, not only when headlines force it, but as part of an honest conversation about student life today. Ignoring it won’t make it disappear. Engaging with it might be the only way to start drawing the line between expression and harm.
Richard Ballard is a sophomore in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He can be reached at rpb233@cornell.edu.
