As antisemitic rage runs wild on the Harvard-exclusive network of an anonymous social media platform, SideChat, the university has yet to crack down on — or even condemn —  the latest vitriol emanating from its campus against the school’s Jewish community.

In the wake of President Claudine Gay’s resignation this week, SideChat’s Harvard forum has exploded with what one student calls “anti-Jewish hate” that could constitute harassment in violation of SideChat’s terms of use. The site’s Harvard community has served as a forum for antisemitic rhetoric since Hamas’s atrocities on October 7.

The university, which does not own or control the site, and also can’t determine who made the postings, has not shown any signs of stepping in to tame the tension. While the Sun isn’t able to confirm independently that the users of the site quoted in this article are Harvard students, users are required to use their official Harvard email addresses to gain access to the Harvard community forum, so it would be difficult for people outside the Harvard community to infiltrate the site.

Posts, which are anonymous, can be removed by Sidekick’s moderators if they are deemed to be in violation of platform guidelines, but users are free to publish them without prior approval. SideChat strictly preserves anonymity. According to its terms of use, “you may not post the full name, personal or biographical information, address, phone number, social media handle, photograph, or any other personally identifiable information about yourself or anyone else on the Services.”

Users are responsible for all activities occurring on their accounts, which must abide by their agreement with the service and applicable law and will “accept full responsibility for any such unauthorized use.”

While anonymous speech is well protected by the First Amendment, it is increasingly becoming a conduit for venomous online comments at Harvard and other universities where SideChat is active. Harvard’s group is bursting with new posts every few minutes, many of which are peddling antisemitic statements that decry “Zionists” as “killers and rapers of children” and blame Ms. Gay’s resignation on “the Jewish population” and “the media.” 

Much of the content used to be innocuous — with deadpan jokes about the dining hall food or queries about course registration — but Harvard’s SideChat forum has taken a dark turn since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7.

“As a Jewish student, I am dreading going back,” one user posted this week in the midst of the school’s winter break. Another student said that reading the posts makes it seem that users had all read Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in Harvard’s introductory writing course. 

“I’m begging you all to recognize the ‘Jewish people are controlling everything’ (and are thus the reason Gay resigned) narrative as an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It is a common white supremacist argument against Jewish people,” one user wrote in a post. Yet another user pointed toward conservatives: “jewish people aren’t the reason gay resigned. conservatives taking advantage of reactionary zionism are. it’s important not to conflate the two.”

SideChat’s terms of use, last updated in March 2023,  prohibit users from sharing content that “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, libelous, deceptive, fraudulent, invasive of another’s privacy, tortious, obscene, offensive, or profane.” It’s hard to see how posts equating “Zionists” — an implicit reference to Jewish people — with “killers and rapers” would fail to fall into this category of prohibited conduct.

“I think SideChat has become a place where people feel comfortable spreading hate they’d never say in person because of the anonymity,” a Harvard junior, Alex Bernat, tells the Sun. “The content that’s being spread here, which I think may reflect some students’ true thoughts, desperately speaks to Harvard’s need to better educate students on anti-Jewish hate.”

Just like their users, the founders of SideChat have remained anonymous. A job posting for the company identifies a former engineering manager at Snapchat and Stanford graduate, Sebastian Gil, as its co-founder and chief executive. As stated in its terms of use, the app is controlled by the developer studio Flower Ave Inc., which also controls the social media app YikYak. 

An unofficial Facebook page, Harvard Confessions, where Harvard students would anonymously post about campus life with prior approval from a moderator, previously filled the role now occupied by SideChat — there was a similar confession page called Tufts Secrets for students at nearby Tufts University.

Posts were subject to Facebook’s community guidelines banning hate speech — or, as the page’s submission form put it, “bullying, political posts unrelated to Harvard life, shit-posting, solicitation, questions, and inappropriate comments about named people will NOT be posted.”

The student-run Harvard Confessions thrived in 2022 but has not been active since last May. By that point, SideChat, with much fewer restrictions on user conduct and boasting its own app to supplant Facebook, increasingly obsolete among college students who prefer Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, took over campus conversation at Harvard and other elite private schools such as Cornell, Tufts, and Columbia. 

While the app has rolled out quietly on campus, students have embraced it loudly. “SideChat strengthens our sense of belonging within the imagined community that is Harvard College,” a Harvard student, Maren Wong, wrote in a February 2023 Crimson article. “Its posts form the elements of school myth, spirit, culture, and controversy.” Yet, she warned that it’s “easy to ignore the conflict simmering below the surface as you scroll, and scroll, and scroll.”

In a sign of the heat that the Israel-Hamas topic has generated in America, protesters supporting Palestinian Arabs in cities across the country have been wearing masks to conceal their identities out of what they describe as concerns over their safety. On college campuses, especially, contentious views appear to be voiced loudest from the safety of the shadows. 

In December, the Crimson published an op-ed by an elusive “Undergraduate Member of the Harvard College Honor Council” who decried the double standard of academic honesty applied to the university president, Claudine Gay, and argued for her resignation. The author was granted anonymity “in order to protect the author from retaliation,” an editor’s note at the end of the piece explained, “and because the proceedings of the Harvard College Honor Council are sensitive and confidential.”

Anonymity also appears to be a reaction to a campus culture that is viewed as increasingly hostile to open inquiry. Harvard’s conservative political publication, the Harvard Salient, relaunched on campus in 2021 “to restore Harvard’s traditions of free speech, intellectual rigor, and open debate.” Founded in 1981, its members — save for the student spokesman, Jacob Cremers — now publish under the names of Greco-Roman political philosophers.

Even faculty members are hiding from bylines. In an anonymous op-ed in the Crimson this fall, seven tenured faculty members of Harvard’s business school came out against what they saw as a flawed investigation by the professional school that found professor Francesca Gino guilty of research misconduct. They chose to hide their names due to “fear of retaliation from the institution whose principles we hold so dear.”

In the case of SideChat, there are not yet any signs that Harvard will engage in “retaliation” against student speech. Harvard’s press office did not immediately respond to the Sun’s asking if the university has any oversight or jurisdiction over students’ posts should they be shared while using the Harvard internet network. Neither did a contact provided on the SideChat’s “support” page respond to the Sun’s queries on whether the app plans to monitor hate speech and harassment. 

SideChat’s future could follow that of its sister company, YikYak, which was shut down in April 2017 amid a slew of campus controversies involving hate speech and harassment that flourished nationwide on the app. Users lost interest when YikYak sought to impose restrictions on anonymous postings and some universities banned it from their Wi-Fi networks. The app relaunched in 2021 with new “community guardrails” to prohibit instances of “bullying and harassment.”