A college undergraduate at a Boston-area university creates a website pitting photographs of college girls against each other in a contest of who is more attractive. The website spreads like wildfire across campus, triggering both enthusiasm and outrage from the student body. Sound familiar? Although the story may draw parallels to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s FaceMash, this time, the man behind the site is one of Boston University’s own.
In a scene straight out of “The Social Network,” BU sophomore Justin Doody launched RateBU.com, a website that poses visitors with the ever-important question of which girl is hotter. But more than simply being an issue of female objectification, the website’s appearance has triggered debates on copyrights and Internet privacy.
It is easy to see why the website is offensive to many women, allowing anyone to post a picture of a girl for judgment by her peers and compiling a list of the top 25 “hottest” girls on campus. But something that many people are taking even bigger issue with than being judged based on their attractiveness is the fact that in many cases, the pictures are taken from their Facebook profiles and posted on RateBU without their consent.
There is no law prohibiting this. According to Facebook’s privacy policy, any material posted on someone’s profile and set to the “everyone” setting can be taken and used without that person’s permission, a policy that Facebook should immediately consider revising. Websites such as Flickr allow users to protect their photographs from being used by others. Facebook should offer the same option. Simply posting a picture on one’s Facebook page shouldn’t make it public property.
Although it undoubtedly brings up important issues, RateBU has gotten far more attention than it deserves. Do the girls whose pictures were put on the website without their consent have reason to be angry? Absolutely. Should crackdowns be made on the protection of private content on the Internet? Yes. But at the end of the day, RateBU is just another website that will probably fade in popularity after a few weeks.
Doody may think that he’s the next Mark Zuckerberg, but his copy of FaceMash is neither innovative nor worthy of the attention it has gotten. While there is certainly reason to be angry about a site that seeks to demean women, the best way of combating the website is to ignore it until it fades away.
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I don’t see how you can publish one tiny story on this on Monday, then wait two days, then put this out. I also don’t see how you can continue to cover this without attributing the site that scooped it and unmasked Doody in the first place, the Quad (http://buquad.com/2010/12/05/ratebu/), when every other source is doing so. I furthermore can’t see how you can comment on the legality of the issue without consulting a lawyer, especially given such a complex issue. Then I REALLY can’t see how you can write an article about it, again, three days later, claiming that it’s “gotten far more attention than it deserves.” That’s pretty damn hypocritical, and you guys are seriously losing all credibility.
Yeah, sounds like you aren’t biased at all.
Also, I heard about ratebu through word of mouth, whether or not the people I heard it from read it in the quad or not doesn’t matter. I don’t have to go around now telling everyone “Have you heard about ratebu, the quad originally broke the story.” This is no different for newspapers, when the issue is obvious campus wide news. When Obama was elected just because MSNBC reported it first doesn’t mean all following news stations had to include in their reports that MSNBC did so.
On top of that, unless you or I were in the daily free press office, how the hell would we know if they contacted a lawyer or not? Whether they did or did not, really doesn’t matter, the fact is, it IS legal, for a number of reasons. There are no ads on the site (as of yet) so he is not profiting, as well as the fact that the images are uploaded with fair use.
Do you know what “hypocritical” means? Writing a story about something and saying the website doesn’t deserve attention isn’t hypocritical you tool.
Here, maybe this will help you, “: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not;” Incredibly the definition doesn’t say you can’t inform yourself and others about a subject just because you don’t like it. To be hypocritical the Daily Free Press would have needed to either a) say they liked it to begin with, or b) have previously supported it.
I understand that this is an editorial post and as such opinion is meant to be a part of it, but your comments are incredibly unprofessional and I guarantee any other credible news source does not tolerate its writers calling commenters, however malicious, “tools”
huh? LOL I’m not a writer for the daily free press. My post was in no way meant to be “professional” because I am in no way representing the dfp. I believe my comment was just as “professional” as the comment I was responding to.
I would certainly hope no news sources would tolerate their writers calling other commenters “tools”, haha.
Also not that it matters, but you clearly didn’t bother reading the main article, in which you would have seen this, “Doody remained anonymous until Sunday when an article by the online student magazine The Quad showed that he had indicated himself to be the site’s founder via Facebook posts on a friend’s wall”
I read this before the main article was posted. I commend the DFP for doing the journalistically credible thing and finally recognizing it has competition. Hopefully that will spur it into getting its act together before it loses the shred of credibility (and money) it has left.
have you heard about the fall of dankcash