GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Sexual comments on a social media site are causing controversy on the campus of Grand Valley State University. The Twitter page, “GVSU Crushes” just appeared two days ago and it already has around two thousand twitter followers.
The page encourages you to send in romantic comments about other students. Then, the page re-posts the message so nobody knows who’s responsible.
“It`s entertaining but I would hate to see myself on something like this,” said Torriah Robins, a GVSU student. “The sexual parts…ugh, yuck.”
Robins and others are concerned because most of the comments on the page are extremely graphic and the posts use people’s full names.
“A lot of it is degrading towards women, and even men,” said Allyssa Kopec.
“That`s just creepy. Like, who thinks of stuff like that?”, said Jake Hesse.
The students we talked to feel that the page makes the university look bad as well.
After the story aired on Fox 17, the person taking responsibility for the “GVSU Crushes”, emailed fox 17 and issued the following statement.
“I understand where you are coming from with your story. My inbox has been flooded with over 500 posts the last day and a half with people posting their crushes. However, I disregard a majority of them because they are simply not appropriate or cross the line. Also, many of them just don’t make sense and others sound like they are posted by friends and are indeed not actual crushes. The lewdness on the page is undeniable, I cannot defend that. All things considered, GVSUcrushes is technically a page run by the students themselves because they supply all the content. I try to be as clean as possible with my posts, but it’s just so difficult with what people have been sending in. On another note, it was simply incredible seeing all the feedback GVSUcrushes was getting in such a short period of time. I created the page Sunday morning and only had about 30 followers when I woke up Monday. When I went to bed Monday I had over one thousand followers. I could not believe how viral the account had gone in just one day. As of right now, while I’m typing this email, the account has over 1600 followers. I did not expect it to hit a mark like that. It’s simply amazing the influence social media has in our world today. My posts aren’t meant to hurt anyone or cause embarrassment, but I do understand how many of these posts are disrespectful towards others. In all, I’m not even sure if I’m going to keep the account up because of the negative publicity associated with it; if I do, I will try my best to avoid posting the very inappropriate things that people send into me.”
Grand Valley State University issued a brief statement saying they did not authorize the use of the university’s logo on the site. They say they will work to have it removed.
