At 3,770 likes, the Confessions of a Southern Miss Student Facebook page has been one of the most popular trends Southern Miss has ever encountered. Despite a slight decline in the page’s popularity as of late, the page is still frequented by numerous students every day. But who was the mastermind behind the page’s creation? Speculations and accusations were being thrown around all over the place, but even now hardly anyone knows who ran this page. While she still wishes for her identity to remain a secret, she did agree to give an exclusive interview with The Student Printz to answer some questions people have been asking for quite some time.
Q: What made you want to start the Confessions page?
A: One of my friends goes to Northwest Missouri State University and they have a confessions page for their school, so I decided that it might be cool to make one here. I really didn’t give it any serious thought until my friend was tagged in one of the posts and we really got to see how fun it was to have a confession made about you.
Q: Did you think the page would be as popular as it has become?
A: No. I never really expected it to get as popular as it did. What really surprised me was just how it exploded in popularity. I actually created the page back in September, but it didn’t get a lot of traffic back then.
Q: How did it work, the two of you running the page? Did you ever get into conflicts about it?
A: It actually works really well because she can post when I can’t. With my latest admin we found out we were actually both in a lot of the same groups, even though we had never spoken outside of Facebook. We still message each other to talk about things concerning the page but now we’re kind of becoming friends. The both of us doing this really helps to keep us both in check when it comes to running the page.
Q: Were there any confessions you didn’t allow to be posted on the page? How did you determine what was published and what wasn’t?
A: If it’s anything that could be about me or one of the other admins we tend not to publish those things because it could potentially lead to people figuring out who we are. I also have a form with rules in it about what to post and not post. Most of it just comes from organizations on campus asking us not to let anything negative be posted about them. We also don’t post anything that could give someone a bad reputation. Also if it’s just plain not interesting or too vague we won’t post it.
Q: Why in particular did you have on the page that no one can make a confession about anything negative to Greek Life?
A: When I first started the page, most of the confessions I was getting was insulting this house or saying this organization was so much better than the rest. It just turned into Greeks hating on each other, and from anyone in the non-Greek community. I didn’t want the page to become something people would use to promote or degrade any specific house.
Q: I know a few people have posted that they would like to take the two admins out on a date. Did anything ever come of that? Basically, did you ever take any of these guys up on
their offers?
A: I honestly have talked to a couple of those guys. One actually turned out to be someone I knew, but I didn’t let him know it was me. Most of the time, nothing really comes of it. If I ever have a real connection with the guy, then maybe something might work out.
Q: Why don’t you want people to know you are the person that started this all?
A: At first, I didn’t want people to know I ran the page because a lot of the stuff coming in was weird and I didn’t want to be associated with anything like that or get in trouble, especially since the page does have the school’s name attached to it. Now, at this point, it’s mainly because it’s so much fun to keep it all a mystery. It’s almost like a challenge to see who can figure out who we are.
UPDATE:
According to the Confessions of a Southern Miss Student page, the Facebook page is now under the management of a new administrator.
Confessions ceased to be posted after Feb. 3 until the evening of Feb. 5 when the administrator posted, “New Management: (I) Convinced old owner to sign the page over to me. Hopefully the mistakes of past admin will be corrected.”
The new administrator said he or she seeks to improve the page, beginning with a five-question survey that a student can only take once logged into an eagles.usm.edu account. The survey includes questions such as, “Do explicit confessions bother you?” and, “Should we get rid of #notreallyconfessionsTTT(?)”
The creator of the page did not inform The Student Printz of the management decision. However, she said in the interview that due to the page’s dwindling popularity and the difficulty of balancing page management with schoolwork, the page would become strenuous to handle.
