Imperial Facebook pages: the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious

The rise of Imperial Facebook pages spans several years, but despite sprouting a number of different pages they are all for pretty much of the same audience. These include such as Imperial College Secrets, Spotted: Central Library and Humans of Imperial, some of which allow students to anonymously submit content to be posted on the page, with others having admins that track down and curate content themselves.

The first page to gain serious traction was Imperial Memes back in 2012, with posts accumulating up to 200 likes apiece and students commenting and submitting constantly. The page became inactive when the moderator graduated the following year, although by then more pages were springing up and attracting thousands of likes by students across campuses and year groups.

The pages’ popularities seem to coincide with holidays or revision periods, and understandably so. Imperial College Secrets, which began in September 2013, has only recently exploded as the Christmas holidays came to an end, with posts dramatically increasing in frequency on the page and the number of likes increasing by a few thousand in a matter of weeks.

The obvious draw of these pages are the sense of community they provide: Imperial College Secrets in particular has attracted a lot of students posting about mental health difficulties, with other students posting comments of support.

Slightly more bizarre was also the attempt to organise some sort of orgy for students complaining about sexual frustration, but generally the posts have been sincere, if not saddening to hear about students struggling with various issues.

Other posts have not been so savoury or positive: one included a link to a photo of someone’s faecal matter in a sink, which was viewed hundreds of times. Another post is about medical student who admits to sleeping with a consultant, with many more posters admitting to drug use, illicit sex, hatred for room/hall mates, and a general apathy for Imperial as a University.

A shocking number seem keen to discuss ejaculate, whether it is in food, shampoo bottles or a jar kept on the window shelf.

It is easy to underestimate the number of students that are actively interacting with the page; despite many posts on Imperial College Secrets attracting tens of likes, some of the polls posted, such as “Which Biology lecturer would you sleep with?” have seen over two hundred votes (Tim Simpson was the winner of that, by the way).

These admins can also be held as liable for the content posted online, as propagating lies or slander to an audience is considered defamatory and can even be sued as a result. Even if the admin doesn’t write the defamatory comment, the fact that they republished the material to an audience, regardless in size, leaves them liable under the Defamatory Act 2013.

Felix investigated exactly what College could do about these pages should they become unsavoury. A spokesperson said that users of College’s IT facilities must not “display, store, receive or transmit images or text which could be considered offensive e.g. material of a sexual, pornographic, paedophilic, sexist, racist, libellous, threatening, defamatory, of a terrorist nature or likely to bring the College into disrepute.”

They continued: “Where appropriate, the College will investigate and may take action under its procedure for dealing with student disciplinary offences.”

They also told us that written consent should be sought from College to use “Imperial College,” either alone or as part of a longer name. This also extends to the crest, and applies to both commercial uses of both of these elements and social purposes too.

“It is the responsibility of all members of the College to ensure that publications and communications bearing the name Imperial College London should not contain material that is inaccurate or detrimental to the good reputation of the College.”

Such pages are not unique to Imperial, and in fact, some aren’t even run by Imperial students. The page Things Imperial Students Don’t Say is ran by the Tab HQ, the national student tabloid group, alongside many other “Things students don’t say” pages for other Universities.

Some have also attracted a lot of bad press in the past, especially those that became popular nationwide.

Laura Bates, the founder of the EverydaySexism project in the Guardian last year, called out the “Spotted” pages, which were very popular with Universities nationwide. These pages often contained posts from students about others, they had “spotted” in the library, although many people were photographed without permission and then posted on the page for thousands to see.

Bates said the pages were demonstrative of “Objectification, harassment and misogyny.” She outlined how female students felt awkward or nervous going to places which had these pages associated with them.

Rate Your Shag pages also attracted the attention of the national media in 2013 after Facebook removed them because of naming students in full. Loughborough University warned students that they would be kicked off their course if they were found to be posting on the pages.

The pages aren’t limited to Facebook either: there has been several Twitter pages of the same nature, although it seems students aren’t ready to move to Twitter just yet. The anonymous twitter account Imperial Gossip Girl (@ICGossipGal) has currently 54 followers, and has only tweeted 23 times.

No doubt more pages will spring up in the future, probably in conjunction with the exam season, although for the time being it seems that the niche is pretty saturated with pages addressing pretty much all aspects of a student’s life at Imperial.

That’s not to say the majority of the posts on the Imperial Facebook pages aren’t funny or entertaining. Many of the posts on Imperial pages seem to capture the ethos of the university very well and make for a great procrastination tool, if nothing else. If you ever wanted to scroll endlessly through snippets into the lives of Imperial student, these pages are probably the best place to start.