There are four administrators to ‘SJU Secrets’, a Facebook/Twitter account that allows students to anonymously post secrets. The fourth administrator was unable to attend the interview. Out of respect to the four administrators, their identities will be kept private.
Torch: What influenced you to start the account?
Admin. 1: Well I created the page and saw that there was no account where St. John’s students could send in secrets, and I follow NYU Secrets and I saw they had a lot of good secrets and I thought that St. Johns’ should have one too. So one Saturday or Sunday I created the page.
T: How did you promote the page?
A1: Well I started posting on different pages, like, ‘Go follow SJU Secrets,’ then I had the other administrator post on other pages so it didn’t look like I was the only promoting it and I invited friends; and after that, every day we would get hundreds and hundreds of followers.
T: Was it hard to promote the page in the beginning?
Admin. 2: It was hard because it was suspicious that it was only us two [administrators] promoting the page because we were sending it to people to follow [our] page. So we had to tell a few of our close friends to spread the word so nobody would know that [we were behind the account]. If 20 people invite you to join a page then you really would not know who was the one who created the page.
Admin 3: Also it got bigger because, you know, when people like things and comment on things [on Facebook] other people see it pop up on their newsfeed and follow the page.
T: Does running the account affect your personal life or school work?
A1: Sometimes we don’t have the time for it or we forget to post a secret and then people send in secrets saying that we are terrible administrators and that we do not post enough. Then I go on a spree of posting many secrets and then I take breaks.
A2: It’s not that it affects our lives, we just neglect it [the account] because we have lives: we all work and have school work
A1: At the end of the day our studies are first so we do focus on our school work more than the account.
Q: Would you want to add more administrators because you are so busy?
A2: We already have four administrators.
Q: Is it easier having four administrators?
A2: We started off with just two administrators and it was fine for a while; and then when the new semester began (Fall 2014) it got harder because we have more work so we had to expand and it has been easier since then.
T: Is it hard keeping your identities private?
A1: Some people do know who the original administrators are, but they don’t know the other two because they came on later. But the majority of our followers don’t know who we are.
Admin. 3: No one has ever come up to me and told me ‘I think you are the admin of SJU Secrets’, so it is not really hard to keep my identity private.
Q: Are you afraid that someone might expose your identities?
A2 There was this one time when one of our identities was almost exposed. To celebrate our one year anniversary of ‘SJU Secrets’ we opened the account to anyone to post anything. If it was graphic or anything we would take it down. So one of our friends, he is a bitter man. He is dying to be an administrator. He comments on every single one of the secrets posted. He didn’t do it intentionally but there was an instance where there was a picture of me drunk after a party and he posted the picture on the page and the comment was ‘One of the admins got too turnt.’
A3: There was a smiley [face] covering [his or her] face but you could still see [his or her] body and if they kind of knew [him or her] they would know it was [him or her].
T: Are there any restrictions on secrets you won’t post?
A1: I’ve received some weird secrets that I won’t post because they violate people’s privacy. People will constantly message us and say ‘Put my secret up.’ People also send us things to advertise and I don’t want to post those things up because that is not the purpose of the page. We don’t want to advertise.
A3: Some posts are too specific. Like we had one recently: a girl sent a secret she had just broken up with her boyfriend. She tried to put him on blast on SJU Secrets. Also there was another instance when a girl hooked up with a guy in a fraternity; she named the fraternity and he also worked on campus so she said where he worked on campus. So you can narrow it down and we don’t want to put that up.
A2: We try not to offend people.
A3: We are not going to post something that is ridiculous like ‘I like tacos.’
A1: A lot of people send the same secret over and over again like the fourth floor in DAC is the best place to study. We are not going to post every single time. We want to hear something different.
T: What is the most outrageous secret you’ve ever had submitted to you?
A1: There was this one secret sent in where a guy had a friends with benefits and they tried to do something from the movie ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, where the guy snorts cocaine off the girl’s butt. Then the girl farted in his face. There was another secret where a girl sent in said she snorted cocaine off the toilet seat on campus.
A2: There was also one where a guy went to his girlfriend’s dorm room and thought she was in shower, but it was her roommate. They ended up having sex.
T: How much backlash do you guys get for putting up a certain secret?
A1: We get a lot of backlash. When I first started the page the first 10 secrets were, ‘Shut the page down. This is stupid. Why are you bringing this up now?’ We get a lot of backlash if we don’t post enough. Or we will also get backlash if we don’t post a certain secret.
A3: We get backlash if people get offended because of a post. Regardless, the audience is really good because they post support to the administrators.
Q: How do you deal with backlash?
A1: I usually write a big speech saying that we have lives. Then I start posting more frequently. Within a week we try to post 30-40 secrets or a good amount per day
Q: How do you split up the responsibilities of the account?
A3: It is kind of, you look at the secrets that have been sent and you just post them. So whoever sees that secrets need to be posted just posts [those] secrets.
Q: Do you guys as admins post secrets too?
A1: Yes, I like to post what i’m feeling.
Q: Do you have any other accounts?
A2: Yes, we have a Snapchat (SJUSecrets) that many people do not know about. People used to send us a lot of pictures but it has died down. I guess people just forgot about it.
A1: I was thinking of setting up an Ask.Fm so people could send us secrets through that outlet.
Q: Would you make any more accounts on other social media outlets?
Admin 2: we thought of an Instagram but don’t think it’ll work. We just want to get more followers, have more secrets sent in, and have people send us pictures on Snapchat. We can’t really expand to any other social media outlets other than that.
T: Do you think you’ll ever reveal your identities?
A2: We probably will when we graduate.
