On a Saturday night in October 2015, a freshman at Cornell University, took a break from studying to check her phone. She opened a snapchat featuring Syracuse University and began to watch.

“Oh my gosh, Syracuse is so much crazier than us,” she said to her friends.

Soon, they were viewing the exploits of SU students on the popular social media app, shocked at its vulgarity and unable to look away. The Syracusesnap story, which is a series of pictures and videos that can be viewed for 24 hours, had a near constant stream of sex, drugs and money.

They saw people snorting lines of cocaine next to wads of $100 bills, people brandishing bags of marijuana, people with bongs, people rolling joints, people with bottles of prescription drugs and alcohol.

Then, there were sexually explicit images. There were semi-nude and fully nude men and women shown before, during and after sex. There were pictures of women lying face down on beds in their underwear or wearing nothing at all, with the captions “pre-smash” and “post-smash” — before and after sex.

She was both entertained and shocked by Syracusesnap. She wanted to get on the story and thought no one would recognize her if she submitted something that didn’t show her face. Many pictures of the women on Syracusesnap showed their bodies, but not their faces, keeping the snaps relatively anonymous.

“I thought it could be just another thing we could laugh and joke about,” she said.

So she took off her shirt, wearing only a bra, grabbed her friend’s pet lizard and laid it on her chest. What resulted was a photo from the chin down with a bright green lizard atop her cleavage. She then sent the picture to the Syracusesnap account and soon after, it showed up on the story, for all of Syracusesnap’s followers to see.

Syracusesnap went viral on the SU campus starting on the weekend of Oct. 23, 2015. By the end of the weekend, it was eventually shut down by Snapchat. The Snapchat story was shut down and banned because it violated the company’s Community Guidelines, which state that illegal activity, pornography and invasions of privacy are prohibited.

Right before it was shut down, there were messages on the Syracusesnap story informing users that it would be moving to Yeti Campus Stories, another social media app created in 2015 where the sex, drugs and parties would not be censored. Users were encouraged to download the app to see the “full story.”

No one has come forward as the creator of Syracusesnap.

Syracusesnap was different from the official Campus Story that automatically pops up on users’ phones when they’re at or near SU. The difference between the two is that the Campus Story is moderated by Snapchat itself, not the university, said Sarah Scalese, associate vice president in the division of public affairs at SU.

Syracusesnap was not affiliated with SU’s official Campus Story. It was a “rogue” Snapchat story of sorts, said Nancy Jo Sales, a journalist for Vanity Fair who wrote about Syracusesnap in a book that was released at the end of February. Other colleges and universities nationwide had or currently have similar ones.

LaNia Roberts, a sophomore painting major and a popular fixture on SU’s official Campus Story, said she was exposed to another, more sinister side of campus, that she had never encountered before Syracusesnap. She said she was mostly sad — and a little scared — after watching the story.

“I saw all these lost teenagers and young people that have money but are exposing their bodies to campus,” Roberts said. “It made me sad that people were valuing drugs, sex and money over respecting your body enough so that you’ll only share it with the people that mean the most to you.”

Even though Syracusesnap was a short-lived, viral phenomenon on campus, some think social media companies, such as Snapchat, need to do more to protect young women from invasions of privacy and non-consensual photo sharing.

Jennifer Grygiel, a communications professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, said she’s not surprised it took Snapchat a few days to shut down the story. But, she said, Snapchat should have acted faster to become aware of the content that violated its own guidelines.

Snapchat did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

On the surface, it looked as if Syracusesnap was just like every other rogue campus Snapchat story, but at other schools, some of the creators came forward. This was the case at University of California Los Angeles, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Iowa State University. No one has claimed responsibility for Syracusesnap yet.

Scalese, associate vice president in the division of public affairs at SU, said the administration could not comment on Syracusesnap because the university is in no way connected to the account.

Sales said it’s impossible to know who created Syracusesnap without access to Snapchat’s servers.

Even though Snapchat has shut down explicit Snapchat stories at many schools, other accounts under different names have appeared in their place. Sundevil_nation became Sundevil.nation and rutgersnudes eventually became ru.snapyak.

Syracusesnap has not been revived, but the story still exists on Yeti. A quick view of the story shows a tamer version of its predecessor on Snapchat. Yet, keep watching and there are still photos of nearly naked women — even though Yeti’s own terms of use say that nudity is prohibited.

Published on March 21, 2016 at 10:53 pm

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu