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Monday’s ABC panic shows how misinformation can spread through a community

When imagining what college is like, high school seniors often draw their ideas from representations of university life in television and film. These depictions are exaggerated: there’s more to college than keg stands. But if a prospective student visiting Monday for Days on the Lawn were to walk by a first-year dorm, she would have found many of her “Animal House”-fueled suspicions about college confirmed. She might have seen first-year students, uneasy after the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control stepped up its enforcement efforts in Charlottesville — and perhaps giddy from a warm day that seemed to mark the decisive start of spring weather — dumping contraband alcohol outside residence halls after unfounded rumors that the ABC was searching dorms for booze went viral.

Monday’s frenzy escalated to comic proportions for two primary reasons. First, and most critically, an interconnected student body linked by social media and other forms of instant communication caused false reports to run rampant. Second, a climate of fear surrounding alcohol use, sparked by ABC’s crackdown and last week’s request from Dean of Students Allen Groves for fraternities to end new-member initiation for the sake of student safety, led students to believe that police officers could or would enter their rooms without permission — and against what the Constitution allows — at a school that, on a sunny afternoon, lies in Monticello’s shadow.

During American prohibition, one could buy alcohol by going to a speakeasy. But today’s underage drinkers can end up dumping alcohol if someone speaks too easily. Instant communication too often lends itself to careless communication. Such was the case Monday. A joke that started with a Snapchat swiftly moved to other channels. Group texts buzzed across Grounds and tweets began rolling in, all carrying erroneous reports that the ABC was conducting random dorm checks for alcohol.

A tightly interconnected student body creates a social dynamic that would not have existed at the University a decade ago. The accelerated flow of information among students sparked contagious anxiety Monday. Much of the student body was thrown into crisis mode. The panic sparked by the false dorm-search rumors shows how rapidly misinformation can infiltrate the student body, as hasty missives about unconstitutional searches outpaced the confirmation that never came. Unnerved students, slopping liquor into dumpsters, found themselves responding to a threat that did not exist.

If the University were to find itself in a crisis situation more severe than an imaginary ABC crackdown, school officials should keep in mind the firm knots of instant connection between students. University leaders, after all, can use mechanisms such as social media to fight the spread of false information. Groves, for example, used his popular Twitter account Monday to correct a dangerous misperception that the University can enter on-Grounds rooms at will to conduct searches.

Underage drinking is so pervasive at many American colleges that underage students, when negotiating the limits of alcohol policies, may believe themselves bound, in practice if not in theory, by internal guidelines that are more flexible than state or federal law. This trend is why ABC’s Operation Charlottesville, while within the agency’s legal scope of action, feels intrusive to some University students. Monday’s hysteria can be partially explained by resistance, in some pockets of the student body, to the ABC stepping up enforcement and to last week’s directive from the Office of the Dean of Students for fraternities to end initiation. Students would be wrong to conflate the two measures: the University has no formal relationship with the ABC. Still, a stronger stance from these agencies toward student alcohol misuse, in addition to undergraduate hyperconnectivity, on Monday caused a panic — not beer — to brew. Though the frenzy could have been avoided, we might add, if underage students chose not to keep alcohol in their dorms in the first place.

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