Ever heard of photo consent?
One of my all-time favorite Instagram accounts is @barstoolusc. It’s one thing to go on my Explore page and see a video of a stranger swimming in a fountain, but when it’s a video of a bunch of fellow Trojans in Speedos splashing around in the Leavey Library reflection pool, it feels 10 times more special.
It’s a little difficult to properly explain @barstoolusc in a way that would make sense to someone who hasn’t seen it before, but it’s basically a public Instagram account that posts about school sports, campus news and features funny picture and video submissions from students at USC. The account has been active since October 2016, and today, over 36,000 people follow the page. It’s also not usual for the content on @barstoolusc to be lewd and crass, and even though all of its posts are about USC, the account itself isn’t affiliated with the University in any official way.
Barstool USC is among several other “Barstool college accounts” that are directly affiliated with popular digital media company Barstool Sports and its “Barstool College Viceroy Program.” According to founder and former CEO of Barstool Sports David Portnoy, “Campus Viceroys … run [Barstool’s] campus Twitter accounts and post the best stuff that’s floating around campus on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc in the name of the Stool … IE – smokes, parties, sports and anything else that a typical Stoolie needs to know about on campus. Funny, controversial, whatever.”
For the record, I despise David Portnoy, but his quote sums it up pretty well. The pages aren’t about getting serious coverage on important school news; they mostly exist to provide people with some lighthearted college-related entertainment.
In general, that’s what @barstoolusc has been doing beautifully all year. Especially this past January, when cases were up because of the Omicron variant and all of my friends and I were worried about classes going remote for the rest of the semester, being able to go to @barstoolusc and laugh with everyone else about Aidan Moriarty’s accidental Reply All was such a great way to escape from worrying about the future.
Recently, though, instead of taking my mind away from upsetting things, @barstoolusc has uploaded some videos that just haven’t been sitting right with me. Toward the end of April, someone sent in a clip of two people making out at a frat party, and even though it was clear that neither of the people in the video knew that someone else was recording them, @uscbarstool still posted it for all 36,000 of their followers to see. Although that post was eventually taken down, it was up long enough for everyone to send it around, take screenshots and repost it to their own accounts.
More recently, on May 1, someone sent in a video of a student doing a workout in the Lyon Center, and, again, even though it was clear that the student in the video had no idea that someone was recording him, the admin of @barstoolusc put it up on the page anyways.
In both scenarios, the person running the account posted these videos without getting permission from the people who were in them — which is an issue in itself, and clearly not OK. However, I have a much bigger issue with the fact that students at USC are recording and publicly embarrassing other people from our school without their knowledge or consent. Yes, it’s disappointing that @barstoolusc went ahead and shared these posts, but let’s not be mistaken — the USC “Viceroy” wasn’t the one who decided to violate another person’s privacy and take a secret recording of one of their classmates going about their day — that’s on the students who submitted these videos in the first place.
The people who were in these videos definitely didn’t ask to be put on blast and none of them deserved it either. After the first video went up, I heard people say things like, ‘If you don’t want someone to post a video of you hooking up with someone at a frat party, don’t hook up with someone at a frat party.’ Frankly, that line of thinking is absolutely ridiculous. This is college. People should be allowed to go to parties and have fun without worrying about it ending up online. And what about the second video? Are we going to start telling people that if they don’t want someone to take a video of them working out at the gym, they need to stop going altogether?
Put yourselves in these people’s shoes. Imagine if you were minding your own business and using the cable machine at the rec center or enjoying your Friday afternoon out on the row, and you woke up the next day to see thousands of people laughing at you on the internet. Nobody deserves that. It’s just not right.
I’d like to call on all of us to go back to sending Barstool videos of ourselves and our friends having a good time at school — no more creepily recording strangers from far away in the distance. I don’t know about you, but nothing makes my day like watching a man willingly and enthusiastically drinking alcohol out of his dirty shoe, or seeing a video of a bunch of girls sneaking muffins out of the dining hall. We know we don’t need to rely on getting a laugh at the expense of a stranger, so let’s just go back to making @barstoolusc a fun place for everyone.