After Waseem Ahmad ’27 left his final exam for Statistics 110: “Introduction to Probability” last fall, his classmates had already flooded the anonymous social media apps’s Harvard “community” with posts commiserating about the “rough” exam.

Ahmad said one post stands out in his memory.

“Me in 20 years: ‘oh what time is it.’ My son: ‘it’s 1:10,’” the post reads, accompanied by a meme template consisting of a chihuahua’s shell-shocked face superimposed on an image of a Vietnam War battlefield.

“It’s a reference to the final, to how bad it was,” Ahmad said of the post, which has more than 1,300 upvotes and is the 18th most upvoted post of all time among Harvard Sidechat users.

Though Sidechat is often a platform for much-needed levity and humor in moments of stress, many students have raised concerns about its effectiveness as a medium for political debates and propensity for spreading negativity.

“It’s anonymous, so people are just more likely to say stuff without meeting the repercussions to what they’re saying,” Tinaye T. Ngorima ’27 said. “I think people are just a little more extreme.”

In dozens of interviews with The Crimson, students on the all-time leaderboard, Sidechat employees, and casual users discussed whether the app facilitates meaningful student discourse or amplifies divisiveness already pervasive on Harvard’s campus.

‘The Loud Minority’

Undergraduates scroll through hundreds of new posts each day on Harvard’s Sidechat forum, upvoting entertaining memes and replying to scathing opinions on campus news.

Despite Sidechat’s flaws, Louis B. Auxenfans ’27 said the app is “more often than not” a source of fun.

“Sometimes it can be too negative, too demoralizing — but it’s just funny to see the memes people make about Harvard,” Auxenfans said.

In The Crimson’s 2024 senior survey, 43.5 percent of 887 responders said they found Sidechat favorable, while 37.66 percent responded “unfavorable.” Surveyed seniors also said Sidechat is their third most used social media platform after Instagram and LinkedIn, surpassing X, TikTok, and Snapchat.

Many students said they passively engage with the app — viewing and upvoting posts rather than creating them — adding that they question whether the pool of students who post is an accurate representation of the College’s student body.

Rosanna Kataja ’24 said the students who actively post on Sidechat are the “loud few.”

“The big posts are dominated by the loud minority — maybe the upvotes not so much, because if you get 700 upvotes, it’s quite a lot of the whole College,” Kataja said.

While some students, like Luke P. Kushner ’27, said the app is “a big joke,” others see it as an arena in which to fight for a coveted spot on the leaderboard.

Sidechat displays “upvotes” and “downvotes” on each post, gauging levels of engagement — users accumulate “karma” over time based on the net upvotes and downvotes their content receives.

The most upvoted Harvard post of all time — featuring a candid photo of former University President Claudine Gay smiling nervously at her September inauguration, captioned “When they ask how my semester is going” — boasts more than 2,500 upvotes, a significant number in comparison to Harvard’s undergraduate population of 7,063.

With 35,000 karma, Kataja is on Harvard’s all-time leaderboard, which displays users with the top 25 karma totals. The leaderboard is currently topped by one freshman student with more than 245,000 karma — nearly the combined total of the second and third place users.

The first place user spoke with The Crimson on the condition of anonymity due to privacy concerns.

The freshman said a “leak” of her class year on Sidechat last winter revealed a stigma on campus around students who frequently post on the app.

“People were saying, ‘Oh my god, she has no life,’ and that ‘She’s probably had the worst freshman year so far if she’s gotten to that point,’” she said. “My screen time is only like one to two hours per day on Sidechat.”

“I’m not a troll who lives in a cave and only makes Sidechat posts,” she added.

Sidechat on a student's phone. By Julian J. Giordano

‘No Accountability’: Sidechat’s Tense Political Discourse

The national spotlight on Harvard’s campus activism after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel opened the floodgates for an eruption of political posts and heated debates on Harvard Sidechat — serious commentary on global events increasingly punctuated the platform’s usual lighthearted quips.

In recent weeks, posts about a pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard have consistently dominated the “Hot” and “Top” tabs of the app, which include posts with high engagement. A May 6 post regarding the encampment garnered more than 1,100 upvotes and more than 50 replies.

“you privileged protesters think it’s cute to get graduation cancelled, but do you know how many of us have to pay so much hard-earned money for our families to attend the single graduation we have ever gotten?” the post reads. “how can you take this away from us?”

Students said the opinions they see on Sidechat are unusually polarizing — perhaps due to the anonymous nature of Sidechat’s posts.

“The people who take the time to air out their grievances on Sidechat are obviously feeling way stronger one way or the other, whereas I think normally Harvard falls more in the middle,” Ngorima said.

Isha M. Sangani ’24 said she has seen people on Sidechat being “really direct and sometimes kind of rude,” in contrast to how students would act in person.

“It’s a small minority that is very active and also those people are not people that necessarily normally feel emboldened to speak the same way they do online, in person,” Sangani said.

“We prioritize keeping communities safe above all else,” Sidechat CEO and co-founder Sebastian Gil wrote in an emailed statement to The Crimson. “We do more than most (if not all) social media apps in moderation.”

Some students said the anonymity also provides a lack of personal “repercussions” attached to user’s names, resulting in less nuanced political posts.

“There’s no accountability, it’s a completely anonymous platform, and there’s no repercussions if you say anything that’s incorrect or do anything that’s wrong,” Kushner said. “You can get banned, but basically there’s no repercussions.”

However, anonymity might neutralize concerns about self-censorship in political commentary — some students said they appreciated being exposed to new perspectives on Sidechat.

“If I don’t know in particular someone who’s super pro-Palestine or super pro-Israel, I can kind of get an access to their viewpoint through Sidechat,” Kushner said.

Whether posting anonymously provides students a forum for free expression or a chance to be needlessly offensive, some students said the posts allow users to avoid accountability.

“Hot take — if you can’t tie your name to an opinion, I don’t think you should have one,” Miles S. Barakett ’27 said. “We all have crazy takes sometimes, but even I’m like, ‘you know what, if I tied my name to that take, I’m going to craft it in a way that’s even better.’”

Undergraduate Input, In Moderation

In a rare acknowledgment of Sidechat’s prominent role on campus, Harvard’s administration asked Sidechat to adjust its standards for moderation in Jan. following complaints of antisemitism on the app.

Harvard Sidechat now requires a verified undergraduate email address. Sidechat administrators wrote in a Jan. 16 post that the inclusion of all Harvard affiliates between May 2023 and Jan. 2024 was accidental.

Sidechat’s online community guidelines include restrictions in several content categories including “Bullying and harassment,” “Misinformation,” and “Trolling.”

“We want our users to have fun on the platform — just not at others’ expense,” the website reads. “We remove bad-faith posts that seem designed to agitate other users, even if other policy violations aren’t present.”

Gil wrote that Sidechat has a “trained moderation team of 30 moderators working 24/7” who review the majority of user reports within one minute based on “keywords, phrases, and through ML models designed to detect bigotry.”

Still, users often question the validity of Sidechat’s moderation policies in posts containing screenshots of notifications that their posts were deleted.

“We investigate every report of mis-moderation that is reported to us via email, reported in the app, or we see shared on social media,” Gil wrote. “We also welcome feedback from the community on times we might not have gotten it right.”

In an effort to generate and moderate Sidechat content — and to facilitate the launch of interest-based “communities” — the app “briefly” employed students as “community managers,” responsible for “flagging content that fails to meet community guidelines.”

According to an onboarding document obtained by The Crimson, community managers were paid five dollars for every six posts and four “thoughtful” comments they posted — 10 pieces of content in total — during up to 10 three-hour shifts per week.

“We value content that directly references your school and/or community and feels relatable to the student experience,” the onboarding document states.

Elise M. Pham ’26 worked as a community manager during the trial period from Oct. 2022 to May 2023. She wrote that the student managers were not able to remove content directly, as only Sidechat administrators take down posts.

Sidechat has since discontinued the community manager position, but still seeks student input by arranging meetings with “power users” — including the freshman at the top of Harvard’s leaderboard — to solicit feedback and discuss new features.

Though she was initially “excited to play a bigger role in the student community,” Pham wrote in a statement to The Crimson that working as a community manager made her see the app as “superficial.”

“Since Sidechat admin encouraged us to post relatable content, a lot of the content were complaints about the campus, student life, faculty, classes, etc,” Pham wrote. “While these may have been valid, it did generate a lot of negative energy that skewed my college experience.”

—Staff writer Madeleine A. Hung can be reached at madeleine.hung@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Azusa M. Lippit can be reached at azusa.lippit@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @azusalippit or on Threads @azusalippit.