“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly….”
These recognizable lines are, as many know, the opening lines to 2007’s The Bee Movie. These same words were what greeted the entire undergraduate body on February 13 at 4:33 p.m., courtesy of first-year mathematics major William Lee. Lee proceeded to send the script of the aforementioned movie, line by line, in dozens of messages that finally concluded at 4:48 p.m.
The 13,767-word script was spread through the chat feature available to any on-campus group on the new DuckLink site — specifically, through the Undergraduate Student Life group all 4,821 students are automatically subscribed to.
Though the entire exchange has now been scrubbed from the group, and thus the ability to send campus-wide messages removed, it has raised several questions about the application of such a feature and the implications it carries for student safety.
Individual clubs having a built-in chat feature to ask questions could serve to be extremely helpful when asking clarifying questions or attempting to organize events asynchronously and in a timely manner. However, there is not much in terms of security within those clubs.
On DuckLink, anyone can join most clubs, and thus, anyone was able to type in any chat. One can imagine the types of issues that one bad actor could have caused to the cultural and identity-based student organizations under this system. Although those who would utilize the messaging system in a hateful way would presumably face the consequences, it would not retroactively remove the harm it would cause students.
Many have wondered who was responsible for the website’s creation and several questionable design choices. The platform was made on Campus Groups through the company Ready Education. This company’s platform defines the campus leaderboard and the chat feature across student organizations. Ultimately, it was the administration that automatically added everyone to the Undergraduate Student Life organization without ensuring they could use it exclusively for their own announcements.
The posting of the popular meme has led to a lot of good changes for the platform.
Lee said, “I intended for it to be a one time joke… No one should be allowed access to [do that],” Students can judge for themselves whether his prank was an annoying nuisance or a canary in the coal mine.
