Confessions Pages

By Nathan Poling

“Spreading like wildfire” is a common saying in the english language. Rumors are no different, especially in a crowded high school such as Upper Arlington. Normally it is by word of mouth that these rumors spread quickly through the halls by. Now imagine a twitter feed that would supply you with all the rumors you could ever want to read about the classmates and teachers that you go to school with day in and day out. Unless they’re about you. In April of 2013 “@UAConfessions” appeared on twitter, created anonymously by a UAHS student. (Grotewold, Matias) At first many of the students at UAHS found the site to be harmless and humourous. All of that changed just a few hours into the accounts existence.

The creator of the account had also created an Ask.fm account. Ask is an anonymous question asking website where you can ask a person any question of any nature without any kind of identification. In the bio of the twitter it was suggested that readers submit their own “confessions” to be added to the feed. About the time that this was occurring the UAHS administration was beginning to counter the reaction to UA Confessions. Twitter was contacted and the account was shut down, the upper arlington police was notified and the school sent an email to parents to explain the situation. (Grotewold, Matias) Emilie Greenwald, UAHS principal at the time says, “UA Confessions was of great concern to the administration. We knew that it had the potential to escalate and that it would if it was allowed to continue.” (Greenwald, Emilie)

She went on to explain that it took the school until the day after the account’s creation to be acted upon by the school. Once twitter was involved they acted swiftly to deactivate the account and begin to search for the creator. Students were asked to come forward with any and all information they had that pertained to the situation.

The tweets that the account was releasing were mostly lies, created by other students and fueled by a personal agenda. The content of the tweets ranged from relatively harmless pokes at other classmates to made up lies about peoples sexuality and “extracurricular activities.” Some of the tweets went as far as to incorporate teachers and their habits both in and out of school.

Over 90 percent of UAHS students knew both what UA Confessions was and nearly the same number of students knew someone personally who had been mentioned in a tweet. (Grotewold, Matias) As these statistics show almost the entire student body of UAHS had knowledge of the twitter account and had read the tweets that were posted. Mr. Theado mentioned that in less than one day most of the school had at least heard of the account even if they had not personally read the malicious tweets. Many students took personal offense to the tweets as they should have.

Now, in 2014 there has been a second twitter account called UA Confessions 2. This account was stopped in just over one day and the creator was penalized according to the student rights and responsibilities handbook. There is also an account called ‘@OHConfessions.” It is not know where the student that runs it is located but the account also has an Ask.fm account and confessions come in from all over the state of Ohio. Affecting many more people that just those that go to UA. These tweets are less personal but most feature some sort of fictional, sexual lie about a school or school district in general. The theme of confessions pages is ever growing in popularity as they spread to places such as Dublin schools as well as string of college confessions pages that feature self-shot racey and/or nude photos of college girls.

Grotewold, Matias. "@SpreadTheWord." Arlingtonian 20 May 2013`: n. pag. Print.

Greenwald, Emilie. Personal interview. 5 May 2014.