Fizz Should Go, and Students Should Reflect

To the Amherst College community: In historically supporting all forms of free and open communication, I have attempted to take a more neutral approach to the question of how we engage with Fizz. Upon its arrival on campus three years ago, the app has spread like wildfire, completely rearranging how our campus receives news, communicates, and gauges popular opinion. I have tried to resist the urge to turn every ugly post or ridiculous rumor into evidence of total campus decline, and to treat Fizz as just another one of those things colleges have to deal with. But, at a certain point, neutrality starts to feel like surrender, and I do not think we should surrender to a culture this disappointing. So, in an effort to make a final stand against an exceedingly corrosive technological tool, I am urging the college administration to block Fizz on Amherst’s campus servers. 

Many of our first-years, sophomores, and juniors would not know this because too much time has passed, but there once existed a campus-wide GroupMe called “Amherstbussin.” To clarify, it is different from the current “Amherst Bussin,” which was an attempted revival, but it never became what it once was. It was one giant group chat with well over 1,500 students at any given time. When you graduated, you left and made room for the incoming class.

It was somewhat of an Amherst baptism to write in Amherstbussin for the first time, and it was a central hub for everything. We had debates with each other, shared campaign materials, QR codes, surveys, announcements, jokes, complaints, and anything else that seemed pressing or unserious in the moment. It was one of the most unifying modes of communication we had, and part of what made it work was that it asked us, at a minimum, to be human to one another. It was not perfect or mess-free, but it was human. If you wanted to say something to the campus, you had to stand by it. 

Unfortunately, when the senior who had created the GroupMe graduated, he hit delete, and what had become a central pillar of the Amherst experience was gone in a blink. Some students attempted to recreate the chat, but it has never had the same spark or reach. In its place, or at least into that vacuum, came Fizz — a platform built on the exact opposite premise. Fizz gave us speed without responsibility and a local audience without the expectation that we treat them like actual classmates. As quickly as Amherstbussin was deleted, Fizz was brought to campus by a handful of ambassadors who couldn’t have known what it would become, and here we are now. In addition to asking the administration to take a bold stance, I also need to ask my fellow students a question: Is this really who we want to be?

We all know, in some way, that Fizz is dangerous. Whether you yourself have been raked over the coals for something that isn’t even true, or have seen a friend attacked or turned into content for other people’s boredom, the app does not contribute positively to who we should want to be as a student body. I recall my first election for Association of Amherst Students (AAS) president, when students who did not even know me, or were too afraid to look me in the eye and tell me how they felt to my face, pitted me aggressively against another candidate on Fizz. That student and I could not have had a better relationship, and what we were seeing was not who either of us was.

As if history was repeating itself yet again, I watched the commentary on the election for the 2026–2027 AAS Executive Board on Fizz last week, and could not have been more disappointed and disturbed by what this app has done to our campus. And that is just one instance in so many. From what I can tell, we are becoming a student body too afraid to attach our name to anything we say, too eager to fall down the rabbit hole of an anonymous app that has done nothing but disparage students, staff, faculty, and administrators alike. Fizz removes the eye contact, voice, consequences, hesitation, and the chance to hear how you sound before you say something awful. It makes it easy to forget that the person being discussed will still have to walk into Val or class and live among the people who just consumed them as entertainment.

Some will say that Fizz is merely a mirror, reflecting what was already present in our culture. There is some truth to that, and perhaps that is exactly what is so unsettling. Our generation has come to rely on social media not just as a tool, but as a way of avoiding the vulnerability that real life demands. The pandemic accelerated that dependence, exposing our generation to the pitfalls of online life unevenly. When school, friendship, conflict, and everything in between were forced online, many of us became even less practiced at having difficult conversations face to face. We got used to the safety of screens, where you can curate yourself and avoid the full weight of another person’s reaction.

The saddest part of this equation is that I am confident we all know this. I don’t think we can or should claim ignorance anymore, because we have been talking about the impact of Fizz for too long without doing enough. I would imagine that many of the people who use the app must acknowledge that it has degraded something in our culture. If you haven’t felt that or thought about it before, I pray now and going forward will be the time. Even the moderators who brought it to campus will say — and many have said it to me — that it was one of the biggest mistakes they could have ever made. If the people closest to the experiment regret helping it along, the rest of us need to consider asking ourselves if it’s still worth running.

I know blocking the app would not necessarily erase it from our lives overnight. There will always be ways to shortcut difficult situations and conversations, and I understand that. But institutions communicate values through the boundaries they are willing to draw. Blocking Fizz from campus servers would not solve our deeper cultural problems. But it would at least clearly state that Amherst is no longer interested in passively facilitating a platform whose most visible contribution has been to erode trust and cheapen campus social life.

At the same time, this cannot remain merely an administrative question. It is, more fundamentally, a question of collective moral formation. What kind of community are we becoming, and what kind of community do we intend to leave behind for those who come after us? Is Amherst to be defined by a student body that retreats into the shelter of localized anonymity in order to defame others without consequence? Is it to be defined by a culture so uneasy with candor, confrontation, and the ordinary burdens of accountability that a faceless digital feed now feels more natural than the act of speaking openly and standing by one’s words? I do not believe that this is who we must be. I do believe, however, that we have permitted this condition to deepen for too long by treating it as normal, and by accepting the fiction that such an app is simply a harmless or efficient vehicle for information about campus life.

But that defense does not withstand scrutiny. Amherst already possesses avenues through which students can seek information, ask questions, and participate in the life of the institution without surrendering the basic norms that make a community worth having. Students can use Google. They can read the Daily Mammoth. They can read and write for The Student. They can speak with upperclassmen about courses, professors, and campus life. They can read the emails sent by actual people who are accountable for what they say. They can attend AAS public comment and ask difficult questions in a public forum. None of these practices are perfect, but all of them preserve something essential that Fizz erodes, which is the expectation that community is built through recognizable persons and the courage to appear before one another honestly. Once we begin replacing those habits with the false ease of an app, we do not merely change the medium through which campus life is discussed. We degrade the civic character of the campus itself.

Fizz is not somehow special in its ability to insert itself into users’ daily lives. It is just another example of a tech company finding a way to grab more of our attention and profit off habits we all know are bad for us. We talk within and outside of class about how apps and platforms mess with the way we think and spend our time, but when Fizz shows up and dresses gossip as community, we fall right into it. It gives us the feeling of connection while making us worse at the real thing. That is part of what makes it not just cruel, but parasitic.

That should embarrass us. Not because we are uniquely weak, but because I know we are not. We are exactly the kind of generation these platforms are built to capture: overconnected, overstimulated, perhaps lonely in ways we do not always know how to name, and increasingly willing to mistake constant access for actual relationships. Fizz did not invent those conditions, but it exploits them brilliantly. And Amherst, of all places, should be smart enough to recognize the pattern. 

So yes, I am asking the college to take a stand. But I am also asking us as students to do better. We should reclaim some basic expectation that if something is worth saying, it is worth standing next to. I am asking us to stop confusing anonymous cruelty for honesty, and digital participation for community. I am asking us to consider whether the future of Amherst social life should really belong to a platform that thrives on keeping us divided. 

While there are many final calls I will make in my final weeks as AAS president, this is by far the simplest. Amherst deserves better than Fizz. More importantly, we deserve better from ourselves.