It’s a typical Monday at Harvard. I’m walking to Memorial Hall for class when I glance at my phone and see a new notification: “harvard students don’t see palestinians as people!” I unlock my phone to keep reading: “I’m done going back and forth, I just have a really hard time hearing pro-Israel stances from people who don’t even believe what they’re saying.” Below that, I scroll through screenshots from a Harvard student statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ October 7th terrorist attack, accompanied by dozens of upvotes and a virulent comments section.

When I became a freshman in 2023, I quickly learned that activists had been influencing campus culture here for years, even though you’d never know it walking across peaceful, carefully manicured Harvard Yard. They’ve been stoking anti-American sentiment, pushing the Overton Window to the left, and have provoked a lot of one-sided debate on Sidechat, an anonymous app that’s quietly become the social network of choice at America’s elite private universities.

Its interface is bold and playful, almost childish. Students verify enrollment with a college email to access the app’s bare-bones social features: posts, comments, upvotes, downvotes, a sorting system (“Hot,” “New,” “Top”), private messages, and a leaderboard. Users are assigned fully anonymous sequential numerical usernames on each new post (e.g. user #1, #2, #3, etc.). There’s no search and no website, and there aren’t external links.

Sidechat launched in 2022. Since then, student activists have used it to organize protests against Harvard, Israel, and Zionist students. Recently, they’ve turned their focus towards the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI programs, Harvard’s federal funding, and international student visas.

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Sidechat was an instant hit on campus in part because it’s so easy to use. Just two years post-launch, an estimated 45% of graduating seniors were users. Today, the app has become so ingrained in campus culture that it’s hard to imagine college without it.

To give you a sense of how popular Sidechat is: on a recent Tuesday, I counted nearly 500 new posts — basically, a post every three minutes — some with engagement as high as 1,000+ upvotes. Harvard has 7,000 undergraduates, so posts that receive 1,000+ upvotes presumably represent 1 in 7 Harvard students — let alone countless others who just view posts.

This high participation rate triggers a feedback loop: Sidechat shapes Harvard culture, and Harvard culture shapes Sidechat. On the app, students have processed every major event that’s rocked Harvard in recent memory, from Claudine Gay’s ouster to Trump’s funding cuts. And campus activists routinely tap into this dynamic to organize protests anonymously.

In April, for example, when the Trump administration demanded the disciplinary records of international students, Harvard undergrads flocked to Sidechat to publicize a rally on Science Center Plaza.

In late 2023, Sidechat drew the attention of university administrators when activists started using the app to organize and promote pro-Palestine occupations. On November 15th, 2023 — the day before student protestors occupied University Hall — comments on Sidechat were already setting the stage for unrest. Two users, OP (the original poster) and #5, argued about Israel-Palestine and the merits of public demonstrations across 68 comments. In the end, #5 — opposing OP’s defense of Israel — retorted, “you don’t even have courage in your convictions coward.”

Following roughly a dozen pro-Palestine protests and occupations in the winter of 2023 to 2024 — many of them organized or incited on the app — Harvard administrators met with Sidechat leadership to ask for stricter enforcement of content guidelines prohibiting antisemitic content. Sidechat leadership reassured the administration they’d tighten moderation in line with the app’s terms of use and community guidelines. Last year, in an email to The Crimson, Sidechat CEO Sebastian Gil wrote that “‘antisemitism, racism, and bigotry’ have no place on Sidechat.”

It appears Gil’s team did ramp up its moderation efforts. Many of the protest-related posts I remember seeing in late 2023 have been taken down. The same goes for posts about Claudine Gay’s ouster. Gil did not respond to my request for comment on this piece.

Of course, enforcing broad rules banning “antisemitism, racism, and bigotry” is enormously challenging. Much of the discourse around Israel-Palestine on Sidechat falls into a gray area between healthy debate and outright antisemitism. One post from six months ago claiming “Israel fr runs America” is representative of how these lines can be blurred on the app.

Posts implicitly defending Hamas occupy even murkier territory. In late October 2023, a student criticized a (now deleted) post arguing that “sadly, extreme oppression warrants an extreme response.” Another student responded: “when has a resistance movement ever been pretty.” The response is still up.

Political discourse on the app covers much more than Israel-Palestine. Earlier this month, Harvard rescinded funding for affinity graduation ceremonies — i.e., a black student graduation or disabled student graduation — at the request of the Department of Education. The decision sparked a heated reaction on Sidechat, mostly skewed toward those who opposed the measure. Cheered on by dozens of upvotes, students posted takedowns and reactions to the policy like “White people mad wack” and “this shit is acc getting so scary wtf.”

Sidechat discourse can feel embarrassing. Shouldn’t we expect more from our nation’s best, brightest, and most elite? Were Harvard students always as intellectually lazy as what’s frequently on display on Sidechat, or does the app’s 255-character limit force them to be? Would #6 ever submit that “White people mad wack” comment for a class?

It’s difficult to tell whether the loudest, most censorious voices on Sidechat truly reflect what most Harvard students think. The 90-9-1 rule of online communities says that 90 percent of users lurk, 9 percent occasionally contribute, and 1 percent frequently contribute. Anecdotal data suggests Sidechat is similarly skewed. The app’s leaderboard shows that 24 students have received over 50,000 cumulative upvotes. Its top three users have garnered over 308,000, 164,000, and 155,000 upvotes, respectively. In the past, these users would have been campus celebrities, the outspoken type to greet everyone at a dining hall and be elected to student government. Now, they’re anonymous numbers on a screen — never to be credited for their influence in the real world.

The rise of anonymous activism obviously isn’t just a Sidechat phenomenon, but its existence is just a little more rich in the context of Harvard. Maybe it’s a testament to how, two years after FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) rated Harvard University dead last in its 2023 College Free Speech Rankings, far too little has changed.

—Jay Gupta