SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the anything-you-say-will-be-used-against-you dept.
The Facebook messaging group was at one point titled "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens."
It began when about 100 members of Harvard College's incoming freshman class contacted each other through the university's official Class of 2021 Facebook group. They created a messaging group where students could share memes about popular culture — a growing trend on the Internet among students at elite colleges.
But then, the exchanges took a dark turn, according to an article published in the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. Some of the group's members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, "R-rated" memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
The students in the spinoff group exchanged memes and images "mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust and the deaths of children," sometimes directing jokes at specific ethnic or racial groups, the Crimson reported. One message "called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child 'piñata time'" while other messages quipped that "abusing children was sexually arousing," according to images of the chat described by the Crimson.
Then, university officials caught on. And in mid-April, after administrators discovered the offensive, racially charged meme exchanges, at least 10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:33PM (1 child)
Bingo. This has nothing to do with First Amendment rights. These kids were being assholes, and they got shown to the door.
They could probably be assholes all they want, except they shouted it into the big megaphone for stupid that is social media.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday June 07 2017, @07:28PM
I would rather that they all shout it into a big megaphone. That makes them easier to identify. Like wearing brown shirt uniforms or black arm bands. I DON'T WANT them mixing in with normal people.
People that commit violence and sexual assault first think these things and say these things. Let's catch it there before it escalates into actions that actually hurt other people.
People who wouldn't do barbaric things probably don't talk, even jokingly, as though they would. And certainly not in a quasi public place.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.