Fizz, anonymous gossip app, attracts chatter and cyberbullying

The first comment about her popped up in April of last year, but the bullying persisted even into August — four months after school had let out for the summer. “Here to remind you all that this still exists,” read one accompanying a screenshot of the article.

“All I wanted to do was talk to my mom and hang out with my friends and never show my face in public,” she said.

She especially dreaded walking around campus and going to the dining hall. “It did make me insecure, walking to class, that it could be anyone,” she said. She was scared people would recognize her and think she would attack them. “I’m like, surely, people aren’t gonna think that,” she said, but she worried that many would if they saw the charges online.

The student feared a repeat of the cyberbullying and asked not to be identified.

How Fizz works

Fizz, one of Gen Z’s hottest social media obsessions, is an anonymous forum designed to link students at specific high schools and colleges. Filled with jokes, memes and even a marketplace, Fizz allows students to interact, socialize and buy and sell anything from bean bags to toasters while promising students a way to connect “safely, authentically, vibrantly.”

While it has been compared to Yik Yak, Fizz is different. Unlike previous versions of Yik Yak, Fizz limits participation only to students from the same college or high school who can provide a verified school email address. Fizz has also taken off as Yik Yak declined. In 2017, Yik Yak shut down because of rampant bullying and racism controversies, including the 2015 arrest of two students in Missouri who threatened to kill Black people at their university. That same year, an Emory Oxford College student was arrested for threatening a mass shooting on Yik Yak. In 2021, the app relaunched with new “community guardrails” and stricter content moderation.

At schools across Atlanta, Fizz collects GIFs, polls and posts where students comment and engage in daily banter that routinely turns into bullying that can be cutting, embarrassing or downright cruel to those being targeted, according to students interviewed at several Atlanta colleges, including Georgia Tech and Emory and Oglethorpe universities. Anyone can be attacked by anyone for anything, or sometimes, nothing at all.

The posts upset the Emory student so much that she wanted to go home but didn’t. “I was screenshotting every single (post), sending it to my mom,” the student told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The app can even find its way into the classroom. Emory senior biology student Nikhita Lalwani remembered one incident where a student in a lecture style science class got canceled for asking too many questions in class.

“Someone called him out on Fizz and it got up voted a lot and he got really called out for it. People were like, ‘stop being such a try hard,’ and things like that. After the comments, he stopped talking in class,” Lalwani said. “That’s terrifying. That’s so scary. I would hate to be talked about like that at school.”

Created during COVID-19

The Fizz app, previously called Buzz and renamed after the idea of information “fizzing” around college campuses, was created in 2020 as a way to keep students connected during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has spread to over 250 schools. The app, a purple icon with a white bumblebee, features a comments feed similar to X with buttons to upvote or downvote each comment. As of last summer, Fizz has been downloaded 600,000 times with about 113,000 active users, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Students police the app’s content themselves. Schools cannot do anything to track it. While the app enlists students by school, the college or high school has no authority over how it operates. A user’s anonymity can only be broken by law enforcement with legal search warrants or subpoenas or in specific emergency situations. And for victims of cyberbullying on Fizz, there is no recourse.

Fizz runs its platform using “community moderators,” students at each school who are active on the app and volunteer to edit out racist and homophobic language that violates the app’s community guidelines. According to the Fizz website, no single moderator can remove a post from the platform without approval by other moderators. Moderators cannot see anyone’s identity.

The student’s friends and editors at The Wheel reported the bullying to Fizz, asking for the posts about her to be taken down. To her knowledge, none of the posts were taken down, and moderators from Fizz told them that taking down posts was not part of how the app worked. But students online complained that Fizz was pressured to take down comments. Later, some Emory students online complained when comments were removed from the app and that Fizz was pressured to take them down. The Emory Fizz account has one moderator who declined to give a name and declined to speak to the AJC.

The AJC also contacted Fizz headquarters in Palo Alto, California, multiple times over the course of three months as well as Fizz founders, Stanford dropouts Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer, and former CEO Rakesh Mathur, but did not receive a response.

For students who face bullying on the app, there is no recourse legally or through their schools. The Emory student’s attempts for help from Fizz — which included contacting the app’s monitors — were ignored, she said.

“There has to be a more stringent process, higher standards, with which we evaluate things in order to have them taken down,” she said.

As for reporting the bullying to the school administration, the student was also left with no options. She had no names to report and no way of identifying them.

No limits on app

While colleges like the University of North Carolina banned Fizz and other anonymous social media apps like it, Atlanta colleges have not. Georgia Tech, Spelman College, Georgia State University and Oglethorpe University do not have specific policies against the app and told the AJC they had not received reports of Fizz bullying. Laura Diamond, a spokesperson for Emory University, declined to comment on cyberbullying on Fizz or whether Emory has protocol in place to address the issue. The university advises students to take complaints to social media platforms and ways to contact campus officials to address a concern.

Thomas Kadri, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, said it is hard to find a legal route to counter the kind of cyberbullying that the Emory student encountered on Fizz. In accordance with the Stored Communications Act, Fizz only releases information about its users to law enforcement through subpoenas, court orders or a search warrant.

“It might be very mean, it might be extremely hurtful, it might cause a lot of emotional distress, but it’s not a clear threat that might violate criminal law,” Kadri said.

The Communications Decency Act, he added, gives companies like Fizz immunity from legal liability and grants them the discretion to leave content up on their platform.

Most popular app

Fizz arrived at Oglethorpe University on Jan. 13.

“Fizz is probably the most popular student app we’ve had at Oglethorpe,” Oglethorpe student Matthew Kwon said.

The community moderators at Oglethorpe have already had to remove multiple homophobic and racist posts in the first week and a half of Fizz’s launch, he added. He knows girls who were upset to find themselves sexualized in comments on the app — an issue the Emory student noted is common on Emory’s Fizz as well.

But there is also another side to Fizz. At Oglethorpe, Kwon said, the app’s anonymity gives students a chance to form connections and community they never could offline. The student body, normally separated into athlete and nonathlete cliques, comes together on Fizz. It’s like being part of a group all experiencing their college in the same way.

“It’s put the two groups into one conversation, and I feel like that didn’t really happen before,” Kwon said, adding the app gives students the chance to connect on one topic: Fizz itself.

A year after she went viral on Fizz, the Emory student has moved on. So has Fizz. Her name hasn’t come up in months. But her experience sticks with her. She hasn’t written about herself since. She is also careful with advice. When a student told her he was nervous about an op-ed he was working on and backlash from Fizz, her advice was simple: don’t write it.

At the time she wrote that original op-ed — when she described herself as in the minority at Emory because her family was low-income and she had to work to support herself at Emory — it felt empowering. Her mom was thrilled when the article came out.

Her mother was surprised that her daughter had shared so much of herself in the essay “because I’m so anti sharing my feelings and anti being raw and vulnerable,” the student said.

When that first nasty Fizz post surfaced, her mom took to Facebook posting the same photo of her daughter and praising her essay. “My oldest daughter is so beautiful!” she wrote.

“These are platforms that are supposed to, in theory, be fun, and there’s a way to make content fun and engaging,” the student said. “It doesn’t have to be mean and engaging for these companies to make a profit.”