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By Joseph Gonzalez ‘28
A discussion about Fizz and the role of social media in our discourse took place at Princeton University on December 3rd, 2025, hosted by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) and funded by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), While the discussion has been lauded as an example of what can come about through open and civil exchange of ideas, several questions remain worth considering. What is the place of anonymous speech in our society? Should someone take responsibility for the things they say? Or has our public discourse been hollowed out by social media to the point where online commentary should be considered performative?
All this came to a head in the wake of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s assassination on a college campus in September, and the ensuing rush to comment from both sides of the political aisle. Princeton University students themselves turned to the social media app Fizz, a campus-only social network launched by Stanford students in 2021 that has become a staple of student life at Princeton. The app functions as a local message board where any student can post anything anonymously. Anonymity may sound ominous but the platform avoids the “bot” problem that plagues other social media platforms, as it is accessible only to those with an .edu email address. Even so, Fizz lit up with dozens of posts reacting to Kirk’s killing. Some users celebrated or made light of the incident, while others urged compassion and condemned political violence, revealing the bitter political divide among students in higher education, with conservative students feeling ever more isolated at an institution that tends to cater to a more left-wing audience.
Each panelist had published an article as a response to reactions on the Fizz app about Kirk’s murder. On the right side of the aisle were Zach Gardner ‘26, Max Meyer ‘27. The left side was represented by Isaac Barsoum ’28 and Christofer Robles ‘26. POCC and PFS deserve credit here because the panelists frequently brought up how unlikely it was for them all to be gathered in the same place. Zach started by noting that Fizz is great for poking fun at campus life and being humorous, but it was a net negative. Isaac agreed that in terms of political debate Fizz is pointless. He thought “the fact that you can say anything without consequence”, allows people to say things that they may not necessarily mean, and that maybe it was time to “reconceptualize what Fizz means.” Christofer also added, “Maybe it was time to consider it more with a grain of salt.”
Max was wary of this idea, “when the sentiments seem serious, when they are vastly upvoted (meaning others approve of what they are saying) and when they seem to reflect sentiments that we are seeing among the broader population of young people.” He pointed to a statistic showing that 41% of voters aged 18-29 approved of political violence in the wake of the Luigi Mangione murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. This reflects disturbing national trends, and Max highlighted that the surveys that exist for Fizz mirror this result. Christofer is not on Fizz and stressed that Fizz is not real life.
But does anonymous speech have a place?
They all seemed to agree that there is a role for anonymous speech. Max and Zach pointed to the role it plays in the protection of whistleblowers, and to the historical precedent set by the Federalist Papers, where you can focus on what is being said, instead of on who is saying it. But they also stressed that the guise of anonymity allows students to say things that they would not normally say. On the left, they agreed, but for different reasons – because it allows you to imagine and express different viewpoints. They agreed that professors and administrators should be denied the same wall of anonymity provided to students, given their place and role on campus.
The next question is, does Fizz promote discourse? Zach sees it as a devaluation of speech. In his opinion, “People should spend more time with words before they are put out in the real world”. Isaac questions the upvote system and the fact that one person could be posting all the posts championing Charlie Kirk's death; there is no way actually to know. But they all agreed that it devalues discourse on campus. Max highlighted how often he has been threatened on social media by anonymous accounts.
When asked if there was any reasonable or beneficial discourse taking place on Fizz, they unanimously said none or hardly any. Even Isaac, who revealed himself to be a top-ten user, agreed that Fizz is not a place for “legitimate campus discourse.”
But behind this anonymous speech is not the question of how a person can conjure up the courage to be as hateful or vitriolic as they want to be. It is whether or not speech has become performative; are they not saying what they believe, or are they just saying what they think is the most popular thing? Has social media post turned into a Schadenfreude pile-on, when bad things happen to people you do not like?
Social media short-form commentary on a very public and high-profile murder is not an accurate way to judge the political climate on campus. It may be simple joking taken to the extreme for upvotes or flippancy. That is the hope.
Joseph Gonzalez ‘28 is a veteran/ transfer student, who has served in both the Army and Marine Corps and is currently majoring in History. He is a PFS writing fellow.
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Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.
Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.
A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.
