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10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked.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: 2) by sjames on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:34PM
I wouldn't characterize that as repression of free speech. I would call it discriminatory and wrong.
Would you insist that the Catholic church not pass someone over for Pope just because he said "There is no God, it's a bunch of fairy tales"?
Do you consider it repression of free speech when someone says "I robbed that bank last week" and he ends up on trial for bank robbery? I'd love to see you argue that one in court!