Juicy Campus Founder Defends His Controversial Web Site

What would actually constitute a post that you would take down? Besides, obviously, threats to people, I've seen articles where people have threatened shooting sprees and you have worked willingly with the police, but what would constitute a post you'd remove?

There are basically three categories of posts where we've said "this is what we will take down." This is where we draw our line and other Web sites might draw the line differently and they're free to do that and we're free to do this. But this seems to work for students where it doesn't feel like there's too much censorship but it's an appropriate level of deletion. These three categories are spam, contact information and hate speech.

More specifically, what would those be?

Well, spam would be -- this is a college gossip Web site, if you're posting your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, that's spam. If you're posting links to your Web site trying to promote it, if you're just trying to fill up the Web site with garbage so that nobody can read the other posts, that's all spam and we'll delete that. Contact information is not just the full name, it really needs to be a phone number, a physical address, an e-mail address, etc. And, as soon as we get an e-mail about that, we'll review it and remove it.

And as far as hate speech, what would you say that would include?

Hate speech is a trickier one. We certainly want discussions about race on our Web site and we allow that. I think race is still a -- if I've learned anything from Juicy Campus -- race is still a major issue on college campuses and racism still exists. So, to foster a healthy debate about that, can be one of the good uses of Juicy Campus. But, to the extent that people are just being hateful -- and I don't know how else to describe it exactly -- if they're not having a real discussion and they're just being negative and hating on a certain race or hating on gay people, or Jews, or whoever it might be, we'll go ahead and remove that.

Do you have a team of people that monitor the site -- how many people actually work on the site?

We have about 20 people working for Juicy Campus right now.