Fizz Should Go Flat

Last week, within 48 hours of its launch, a new social media app called Fizz took over the screens of the college’s students. The college-specific app, which was started in 2021 by Stanford drop-outs and requires a phone number and “.edu” email verification, allows users to post anonymously. You may have discovered it when you got a free donut from the paid student ambassadors tabling in Valentine Dining Hall. You might even be a student moderator, paid $500 a month to post upwards of 30 times a day and take down flagged posts. Even if you haven’t downloaded the app, you’ve likely felt the splash it has made on campus — for better or for worse.

Through lighthearted jokes about the inexplicable disappearance of Val’s cherished miso-marinated salmon or the complaints about the recent bouts of heavy snow, the app has created solidarity among our student body. Fizz undeniably does a good job at providing a space for Amherst-specific discourse. However, the ease with which that space has been misused and what it reveals about our community means that the negatives outweigh the positives.

The biggest danger of the app is precisely the reason why it is so popular and why it has been so effective in starting community discourse: its anonymity. Students can say what they want without fear of community retribution, which allows for users to bond over trivial matters without assuming responsibility for their comments, but it also means that students can quickly type offensive and potentially harmful messages and send them off within seconds without a single concern for backlash or consequences. At a small college like Amherst, anonymity is at once appealing and detrimental.

Anonymous platforms are nothing new, even to Amherst. Ranging from international to locallybased, they’re plentiful on the internet, including spaces like Reddit and Fizz’s somewhat disgraced and cyberbullying-ridden predecessor, YikYak. Anonymous intellectual discourse on our own campus was encouraged by the emergence of the controversysparking Contra in 2022, a publication for writers to publish divisive opinions without their names.

The danger of anonymity on Fizz, like these platforms, is the lack of accountability for harmful and misinformed voices. In just its first dozen hours, the app was already flooded with troubling “Fizzes,” including posts calling out students by name, climate change denial, racist remarks, rampant hyper-sexualization of women, and body-shaming, among other harmful