Last week, many Trinity students began using Fizz, an anonymous discussion-based app similar to Reddit. Trinity students were able to both use the app and be paid by Fizz to repost them on Instagram or table for the app in front of Coates Student Center or the Witt Center.
Fizz was created in the summer of 2021 by two Stanford University students to stay connected during the COVID pandemic. Now, Fizz is slowly being introduced onto college campuses with localized launches organized by the company. College students can only access the app by logging in with their university emails, placing the user within their campus community, allowing them to share their opinions without the consequences of traditional social media outlets.
Fizz posts are not completely uncensored; there are Fizz-employed student moderators who flag posts that violate Fizz community guidelines. There are also campus ambassadors, students whom Fizz pays to promote the app on campus. Kylie King, sophomore marketing major, is a Fizz ambassador and emphasized that the app as a way for students to bond over shared experiences.
“[Fizz] helps the Trinity community get more connected with each other,” King said. “Download the app and try it out for a week. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep it, but I think it’s worth a shot.”
While many students downloaded the app when it launched on Feb. 19, some are hesitant to use it. Julie Schwam, sophomore human communication and political science double-major and lead Fizz launch ambassador, experienced pushback from students when trying to get help promoting the app on launch day.
“People thought I was scamming them because it’s kind of hard to offer people money and tell them to do this thing,” Schwam said. “Even with the people that I’m close to, they were like, ‘Did you get hacked?’”
The Trinity community is no stranger to anonymous social media accounts. With TU Snaps and Instagram accounts like @tu.missedconnections and @tucomplaints, there is a historical demand for students to have a place to communicate anonymously.
Despite student familiarity with anonymous accounts, there are concerns about hate messages with an anonymous messaging app like Fizz in a small community. Liam Worsley, sophomore computer science major and former Fizz user, noticed the rise in messages toward individuals and Greek life.
“The most memorable [posts] were usually directed at fraternities or sororities, and saying very weird and extremely not true and hurtful stuff towards those organizations,” Worsley said. “This is basically just uncontrolled chaos until something extremely bad happen, so I’m hoping the app fizzles out.”
There are also transparency gaps between Fizz’s privacy policy and what students assume they sign up for. The company is allowed to share user information with other parties in the event of a business merger, and vendors on behalf of Fizz.
Upon signing up, the app prompts the user to input their phone number, birthday and school email address. Worsley also emphasized that there is no true anonymity on Fizz because, according to the privacy policy, the app has access to track user locations, browser types and IP addresses.
“That is another level of ways that they can track you that they did not disclose initially to a person using the app,” Worsley said. “As a computer science student, I was interested in this and so I looked up their privacy policy. Probably almost everybody else did not look this up and they do not know that.”
Right now, memes and student confessions are overtaking Fizz. With platform updates such as a posting leaderboard and student organization verified accounts, Schwam commented that Fizz could be an update to TU Snaps.
“I was hoping that Fizz would be a new outlet where people could have a central location where they posted things,” Schwam said. “I’m hoping that we’re kind of transitioning into a place where [Fizz] is actually a useful thing and not just somewhere where you can complain.”