OSU Crush gives secret admirers an anonymous outlet

Seth Shanley
Tue, 04 Dec 2018 02:40:32 +0000
Arts & Life, News, account, anonymous, campus, college, crush, ohio state, OSU Crush, secret admirers, students, twitter, voice

OSU Crush has nearly 20,000 followers on Twitter since being created in 2012. Graphic by Jack Westerheide | Managing Editor for Design

With Twitter playing a major role in the 24-hour news and entertainment cycle for college students, “crush accounts” have popped up nationally and become a mainstay of campus culture. Due to a massive student population, it’s only natural that Ohio State has its own thriving crush account.

“Send us your crushes & they will be posted on this twitter, anonymously,” OSU Crush’s Twitter states. This process is similar to most other crush accounts; users send a message and the account posts it.

First created in 2012, OSU Crush now boasts more than 19,000 followers and 43,000 tweets. On a good day, the account receives up to 80 submissions from students, which add to the current total of nearly 51,000 overall crush submissions.

Alongside being a voice for Ohio State students with crushes, the account is a forum for students to talk about campus, Mitch Hooper, Ohio State alumnus and former manager of OSU Crush, said.

“The crush account is so much more than just people [saying] like, ‘Oh I have a crush on this person or I like this person.’ It’s kind of evolved into this thing where it’s like, ‘I don’t like this professor’ or ‘chemistry class is really hard this semester,” Hooper said. “It’s become a place for people to kind of open up and complain about things, but also profess their love for people.”

With such a high volume of daily submissions, sorting through them is the hardest part of running the account, TJ Neer, current manager of OSU Crush and a fifth-year in journalism, said.

“It’s like sifting through the worst of campus and finding things that I think would do well as a Twitter submission,” Neer said.

Due to the promise of anonymity, people will sometimes submit offensive content, both Hooper and Neer said. It’s the job of OSU Crush’s manager to make sure nothing distasteful makes it onto the page.

“For the most part I think it’s pretty reasonable, like it’s ‘I saw this girl with a dog, you’re super cute!’ or a missed connection or something, but sometimes the worst comes out in people,” Neer said. “I won’t post anything overtly racist or overtly sexist or blatantly attacks people.”

Despite these issues, Hooper sees OSU Crush as a valuable asset to Ohio State’s campus culture and student life.

He said the account is made for secret admirers, student discussion and, above all, entertainment.

“I think people just get pure entertainment value out of it. There’s something about someone just tweeting out a picture of their dog or something funny that happened on campus and just the whole viralness of it,” Hooper said.

OSU Crush is owned by 1870 Magazine and can be found at https://twitter.com/OSUCrush. Students can submit their messages at http://1870mag.com/crush/.