13th September, mid semester exams were just round the corner and like every exam you could sense the stress levels of the campus skyrocketing. This is usually the time when the average IITian, starts looking for an escape and “IITK Rage” proved to be a perfect platform to assauge the students’ pent up souls .
What started as an innocuous page to allow students to vent out their exam frustration soon spiralled out of hand as the posts became contemptuous, derogatory and personal. Being the “brightest minds of the country”, it is believed that the students would be prudent enough not to cross the tacit line but the power of anonymity brought out the worst in all of us.
Fortunately, there was a silver lining to all of this, certain sensible fifth years, took it upon themselves to stop this savagery. A post on the lines of “if you still like this page, by the end of this day, I shall remove you from my friend list” was made by a student. The post further urged the campus to follow suit. Other students also posted their disgust over the “rage page”. Prima facie, one might have shrugged off this post considering it to be naive; but the impact of this post was far reaching, eliciting the required response. In no more than 12 hours, the page was reported and removed from Zuckerberg land.
Albeit the intentions of creating the page were innocuous, we should be wary of the repercussions of such actions; especially with the power of anonymity social media bestows.
This article is written and edited by Priyank Jaini and Srijan R Shetty
This article was part of the series of Quora posts by Vox Populi during Semester I, 2013-14
