MOORHEAD – On Nov. 3, an Instagram account, @fizz.concordia, made a post that said “Fizz is launching at Concordia in 24 hours.” The account currently has 350 followers, and reposts posts that users at Concordia have made on the app.
According to Fizz’s website, Fizz is a social media app that is a “private discussion and news feed for your school…[where] you control your anonymity. The privacy of [a] Fizz community is maintained through the requirement of a valid university email address.”
Fizz provides a private social media feed for each school it services, and students are prompted to provide their .edu email addresses when signing up for an account. Fizz is not affiliated with any college in any way. Despite students being prompted to input college email addresses, institutions do not have access to student activity, barring legal intervention.
Fizz launched at Concordia on Nov. 4. According to the Fizz website, over 250 other colleges have their own Fizz feeds, including MIT, Yale, Stanford, Spelman, and St. Olaf.
Sophomore English Literature major India Carlson said that she uses the app almost daily and posts about twice a week.
“I don’t go on it that often. Maybe once a day, or every other day,” she said. “[I post] twice a week maybe.”
Sophomore Communication Studies major Jocelyn Laux reported similar usage as Carlson, saying she used Fizz “probably daily.”
Both Laux and Carlson joined the app after hearing about it through word-of-mouth. The Fizz Instagram account followed both of them, but they didn’t join the app until hearing about it from friends.
“They followed me on Instagram, but I was like, this is just another…club. I didn’t know what it was, and then [another student] told me about it, so I got it,” Carlson said.
A large feature of the app is that users can control their anonymity. When creating a post, users can choose any pseudonym to post as, with “‘Anonymous’” being the default.
Carlson says that she likes that Fizz is largely anonymous.
“It’s anonymous, which seems like it would be weird, but it’s kind of nice because I can say…the dumbest stuff, and no one knows it’s me, until I tell everybody that it was me who posted it,” she said.
Laux says it’s easy to post on Fizz because users don’t have the worry of social judgement from classmates.
“I feel like it’s just easier to post because you’re not worried about people…judging you,” Laux said.
Both Laux and Carlson said that they had seen posts on Fizz that were offensive or crossed the line.
“There was that period where all it was was making fun of [a student], and I feel like some of them were over the line,” said Carlson.
Fizz also differentiates itself from other social media apps because its userbase is split up depending on the college they’re attending. This means that Concordia students can only see posts created by other Cobbers.
“I like it because the only people who can get it for us is Concordia students. So, it’s very relatable because we’re so small,” Laux said.
Things that happen on campus are often posted about, and users can easily relate to them because they experienced the same thing.
“Like the one day when the radio [in DS] was going crazy, and everybody was posting about that. It’s just fun because we all knew about it. It’s just funny because we get it in a way that you can’t get seeing a random celebrity’s post on Instagram,” said Carlson.
Carlson is the person who referred Laux to the app.
“And now she likes it more than I do,” said Carlson.
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