Fizz Goes Flat: The Mimetic Danger of Anonymous Social Media

Claremont McKenna College students at the Kravis Center. (Photo Credit: CMC comms)

Fizz is a mobile app that lets college students post anonymously to their campus community, verified only by a school email. The app sells itself to students as a fun, casual campus-exclusive feed to share jokes, memes, and gossip. However, Fizz quickly becomes a place for targeted bullying, false accusations directed at students and staff, and pile-ons that spread rapidly. Unverified information about campus events can be misleading and even dangerous. The lack of identification absolves users of responsibility, emboldens them, and empowers scapegoating.

Screenshots from the Claremont Colleges' Fizz feed during the March 13, 2025 shooter hoax incident illustrates just how rapidly anonymous false information spreads and builds off of itself. Within minutes of Campus Safety's first message alert, posts claiming the shooter was “contained between Bauer and Roberts,” that Campus Security had confirmed “an active shooter,” and that “multiple corroborating stories” of gunshots had been heard were gaining attention in the main feed. The posts racked up hundreds of upvotes, with one post reaching 1.2k. None of the content had been verified. 

Claremont Police Department Lieutenant Jason Walters later confirmed the incident was a “swatting” hoax, with officers finding “no signs of any crime” after sweeping the entire campus. Yet on Fizz, anonymous accounts had already constructed a detailed narrative: accusations about the supposed shooter’s appearance, real-time accounts of events on campus, instructions on where to go and what to do—spreading false location details and intensifying student panic. Because no one could be identified or held accountable, there was nothing to stop the misinformation from compounding.

Claremont Colleges Fizz feed during the March 13, 2025 swatting incident.

Fizz also emboldens students to express their resentments and transforms the campus feed into a digital stage for conflict. Fizz claims “any hateful speech or content that threatens the real-world safety of anyone is not tolerated and will be strictly removed,” but its content monitoring is ineffective.

There may be a deeper reason these conflicts erupt so easily. The philosopher René Girard observed that premodern societies contained collective violence by uniting against a chosen victim. In The One by Whom Scandal Comes, he argues that when people can’t express anger at its source, they often redirect it toward a scapegoat: “Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.” Fizz gives the college community an anonymous way to do exactly that—scapegoat students.

Fizz says it has guardrails. The company trains student moderators and lays out clear rules on its website. Fizz insists that harmful content “will be strictly removed.” But the Claremont experience shows the real difficulty of keeping anonymous spaces civil, and harmful content often stays up long enough to do real reputational damage. Girard’s insight is that communities cannot resist scapegoating; Fizz removes the only thing that might slow it down: accountability.

When our own desires are unclear, we interpret others’ pursuits as evidence of genuine desire and adopt those desires as our own, regardless of whether they are truly ours or even theirs. Algorithms that govern visibility on social media amplify what has already been socially validated. Girard put it simply: “people often don’t know what to desire, so they imitate the desires of others.” On Fizz, posts rise or fall based on upvotes and downvotes, and the crowds follow.

According to Girard’s mimetic theory, human desire is not instinctual but learned through imitation. We want what others want, and the rivalry itself outweighs the value of the object. Think of the scramble for Taylor Swift tickets or a J.P. Morgan internship: the frenzy is partly about the thing itself, but mostly about the crowd wanting it.

Anonymous voices shape the narrative of an entire campus. Even with campus email verification, readers rarely know who posted what, a student, a troll, or someone with a grudge, and that uncertainty is itself destabilizing. When the crowd joins in, the scapegoat effect kicks in: a community vents its frustrations by focusing on one unlucky person or group. Fizz intensifies the scapegoating already present on social media, while raising serious ethical concerns, including the risk of doxing someone based on unverified accusations.

Some may argue that misinformation would have spread through other platforms regardless, or that responsibility lies with campus institutions to communicate clearly during emergencies. That is fair, and institutions should absolutely provide timely, accurate guidance. But the Claremont Colleges community comprises over 8,500 students across five campuses, and in a crisis, official channels will compete directly with the noise of anonymous feeds. All it takes is one misinformed post and one student, who sees it before an official update, to make a decision.

This issue raises bigger questions. Where should we draw the line on anonymous speech? Perhaps we should not extend First Amendment protections to Fizz and similar apps, to what is merely binary coding, ones and zeros, and not actual people. Should online platforms protect anonymous accounts the same way the First Amendment protects individuals? In the digital age, these are complex dynamics without easy answers. Fizz’s promise of a humorous and carefree anonymous space may sound appealing, but anonymity often brings out the worst in people.