Hope Conway-Gebbie, a student who has become famous in Edinburgh for her frequent comments on the university confessions page ‘Edifess’, has been banned from the page.
The third year student, by her own estimation, commented on half to a third of Edifess posts every day before the ban. She said it was “often enough for people to start calling me ‘Edifess girl’ and recognising me in public”.
Facebook pages where students can anonymously post ‘confessions’ have become a staple of university life in recent years. The ‘admins’ who decide which confessions are posted, are also generally anonymous. Edifess, the page for University of Edinburgh students, has nearly 20,000 followers.
Hope believes she was banned for criticizing the admins in the comment section of a confession. She called the admins ‘performative’ for using a new logo that includes LGBT rainbow flags despite posting a confession a month before that Hope considered biphobic.
The confession she objected to, which has since been deleted, claimed to be from a lesbian who dumped a woman she was dating when she found out the woman dated men as well as women.
Her comment, among other critical comments, was deleted. In the comments of another post she wrote “you don’t have to listen to the naysayers if you can just delete their comments” and the next day she was banned from the page.
The admins, who run the page anonymously, have not given a reason for the ban and did not respond to The Student’s request for comment.
On the experience of being banned, Hope said “My reaction was honestly one of disbelief. What I did was so minor it really didn’t warrant such an overblown response. [Commenting] was something I enjoyed doing, it made me feel more connected with my peers. I do have a bit of FOMO [fear of missing out] from not being able to interact with posts anymore.
“The admins are anonymous and accountable to no one, so I really don’t understand why they took it so personally that people who don’t even know their names were criticising them.”
Hope and a group of her friends have now set up a rival confessions page called ‘ConfessED’. She said that ‘I do think it would be good for students in Edinburgh to have an alternative to Edifess. A new page with more engaging content will be refreshing.
“Many students have said to me that [Edifess] has gone downhill in recent years, which is actually what I attribute my recognisability to. The comment sections are genuinely more entertaining than the posts, so those of us who contribute frequently have become well known.”
The alternative confessions page can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/confessEDinburgh
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