Delete Fizz.
Right now. I’m serious. If you close whatever browser you use, delete Fizz, and never open this article again, I will be happier than if you pored over this article and left that ugly purple bee blemishing your home screen.
Fizz, an anonymous social media app designed for colleges with a platform specifically for Emerson students, is a cancer to the Emerson community. It offers us a space to be unashamedly honest, but like its many predecessors and iterations on other campuses, such as YikYak, Fizz is little more than a cashgrab—one that is genuinely killing our ability to be kind to each other.
We all sat through school lectures and workshops about bullying. We all had to hear about the adverse effects of this (at-the-time) newfangled threat: cyberbullying. We saw cyberbullies depicted as monsters behind our screens, as caricatures of evil teenage girls and boys with zero redeeming qualities, and we othered the perpetrators accordingly. But on Fizz, there’s no doubt the perpetrator is us. At least a quarter of what I see on Fizz is blatant cyberbullying, and the other three quarters isn’t that much more uplifting.
This is not all our fault. It’s difficult to find positive things to talk about when the news cycle has been so grim for such a long time, and it’s near-impossible to keep that negative mindset from affecting the way we engage with others. But there is a line between recognizing and sitting in this discomfort and letting this negativity run rampant in the way we treat others.
And we have crossed it.
The current administration, whether we like it or not, has the ability to shape the tone of cultural conversation. This has slowly meant an increase in some of MAGA’s favorite things: jabs, derogatory nicknames, sly, and not-so-sly, comments about things like appearance or intelligence. It’s easy to think of that as a partisan thing, but it is not. Meanness, as a characteristic of increased polarization, is on the rise across the political spectrum. The longer we ignore it, the more the comments start to hurt, and the more that unnecessary cruelty tears our communities apart from within—exactly the agenda of those pushing our dialogue toward callousness.
It is a manifestation of this ignorance, this increase in hate, that allows Fizz to exist in its current form, and keeps people coming back again and again to see who’s on the chopping block today.
This is not to say that criticism is invalid. Many things do warrant criticism, and I am hugely in favour of prioritising betterment and personal improvement over blanket niceness. If you’re not being nice, though, you do have to be kind. Kindness means educating and providing constructive criticism, and allowing people to take accountability. Kindness is not a hate comment.
We’ve been online for so long that I’m afraid we’ve forgotten how to be kind. I’m afraid that we’ve forgotten that, when we type up a silly little jab about our roommate or a classmate for everyone to see, there is a person on the other side of the screen. There is a target. There is someone out there who deserves kindness, and is instead being made mockery of for a measly 25 upvotes. Is it really worth it?
I’m old enough to have known an Emerson without Fizz. Can I say with confidence that people were nicer before Fizz? No. But at least more people had the common decency to say things with their name attached. Anonymity kills accountability, and that’s what Fizz has done to us. It has killed our ability to be held accountable for our mistakes and to learn from them.
When we face no repercussions, what’s stopping us from sharing—and being validated for—our every thought, rude or not? Nothing. But I know what should be stopping you: the fact that you are bullying somebody, whether you intend to or not.
Imagine telling someone on the street that their outfit is ugly, or their hair is greasy, or that they are stupid. Imagine their face falling, ruining their whole day, making them question their self-worth, their place on campus and as a member of the Emerson community. Would you still make that comment?
If the answer is no, then stop doing it online, and stop upvoting other people doing it online. If we continue to allow this level of petty hate, it will only worsen. People already make xenophobic and sexist comments on Fizz. There is nothing standing in the way of these posts devolving into more discriminatory comments, and eventually, full hate speech.
So delete Fizz. You might think that you’ll miss hearing every single complaint about this school and the people who attend it, but you won’t. I can promise you that.
