Beyond the Hill

Two Faced: Cornell students develop sorority ranking website, creating controversy

Andy Casadonte | Art Director

It sounds like the story behind “The Social Network”: a group of people launches a site that compares the headshots of female sorority sisters, drawing major controversy.

Except it’s not Harvard University, it’s Cornell University, and the creator of the hot-or-not site is an anonymous group claiming the site is an experiment.

CornellFetch.com launched on Aug. 12. It takes photos from the women’s Facebook pages and lists their sororities and names. The website has no instructions. It simply lets users pick between two pictures of sorority sisters, or hit skip. There’s a form on the site that lets people request their pictures be taken down.

The site has gotten more than a million views and has a list ranking the top 10 women, The Cornell Daily Sun reported Aug. 14. The website drew so much controversy that its creators received death threats and spam campaigns, according to Cornell Insider.

In an interview with Cornell Insider, the creators said the site is a potential experiment in data analysis, designed with little instruction to allow the site’s creators to observe how Cornell students vote without any influence. The point, the creators said, is to see if students vote for or against specific sororities, and if their voting changes with incentives.



The creators of CornellFetch also said they planned to release the data from the site, though a date isn’t specified.

John Carberry, director of press relations at Cornell, told The Cornell Daily Sun that the university “would never condone such as site.”

The site remains up more than two weeks after its launch, but the total vote count has not been updated since Aug. 18.

CornellFetch keeps a feed of press reactions on the site. Its main page headline is, “Stop trying to make CornellFetch happen! It’s not going to happen!”

Although CornellFetch offers a removal request form, the Facebook profile pictures were initially mass posted without any permission.

George McGuire, with the Syracuse University College of Law, said Facebook’s privacy policies do not mean the photos can be used “for the taking.”

“Something like this could potentially be copyright infringement,” said McGuire, who is also a partner at Bond, Schoeneck & King. “The New York State Civil Rights Act also provides individuals with publicity rights if these images are being used without consent for commercial gain.”

The public response has been primarily negative. The Cornell Daily Sun quoted a student who saw her own picture and described the website as “childish,” “objectifying” and “set(ting) girls up to feel badly about themselves.”





Top Stories