By Daniela Santos

The month of October was secret filled for Wheat Ridge High School students who had Twitter accounts.

Reaching up to 300 followers, an anonymous confessions page named WRHigh Confessions was a platform for students to submit comments without revealing their identities. The comments had no filter and were off-putting.  Students criticized the life styles of their classmates, ranked girls based off their appearances; shamed other girls on their sex lives and posted various other negative remarks.

The page suddenly reached the end of its 15 minutes of fame when assistant principal Bill Blandon asked the creator of the page to take it down. “A student came to me and they were really upset because of the postings that were […] basically making fun of people,” says Blandon. Both principal Griff Wirth and Blandon agreed that the senior who started the page was forthcoming and told the administrators that hurting other people was not his intention when creating the page. His objective for starting the page remains unclear for he had no comment.

Other high school and college students create pages similar to this one either on Facebook or Twitter. Two years ago Michael Heyward launched an app called Whisper which is a secret-shaping app designed to let users share their deepest darkest thoughts in meme-like displays. In those two years the app has received’ much attention; social media page BuzzFeed even uses the app as the source for their some of their listicles (articles in the form of a list) and their videos. Articles include “13 Scandalous Disney Worker Whisper Confessions” and “Whisper App Confessions You Can Probably Relate To.” The page correlates with people around the age of high school students. The Huffington Post says that the app is mainly used by users 18 to 24 years old.

Regarding to the Twitter page, Wirth believes our generation needs a few lessons on how to use social media responsibly, “You guys live in a strange era of new technologies and yet people don’t really have an understanding of the ethical boundaries.”  Blandon sees the use of anonymous pages as a “cowardly” way to poke fun at people. He suggest that students confront each other face to face and if these pages hurt anybody then just “turn your account off.”