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.