Most technological social experiments lead to the same result: the Internet is full of assholes.

The CMU Confessions Facebook page is no different. It’s a slow-motion car wreck. and a miserable excuse for social interaction for our campus. It’s sparked questions from campus administrators, provided sanctuary for LGBT students afraid to come out and offered a forum for people who drunkenly urinate in the North Avenue dorm elevator.

The confession page, in all its literal and figurative crapiness, is an absolutely wonderful grassroots experiment that should not be interfered with by either student leaders or administration.

It’s the beauty of free speech meeting the freshman-year experience. It’s wonderfully immature, oddly creepy, often disgusting and a bastion of bad decisions. It gathered nearly 700 likes in the first 24 hours, making it popular among a usually anemic student body. It’s an unusual page where students post crazy, unbelievable things that probably never happened.

Without criminal activity or copyright infringement, there should be no way this kind of page gets shut down.

That has not stopped student leaders and administrators from other schools from trying to shut their confession pages down, however.

University of California Santa Barbara has an ongoing battle where student government has attempted to shut down the school’s confessions page, saying that it wanted “to draft a resolution condemning social network pages that misrepresent the university.”

The resolution reads: “[The pages] affect the campus climate even though it’s not directly on campus. They affect students. There have been racist comments, there have been hateful comments, and there are just many “isms” on [this page] that I’ve heard numerous complaints. It is hurtful, and it has been affecting students negatively.”

This is exactly the type of situation where free speech and the First Amendment desperately need to be enforced. It’s not only idiotic, but, dangerous to suggest that the perceived representation of the university outweighs the schools need to support free speech of the students, however unpopular. In this generation, students look down on others who throw around racist slurs and homophobic generalizations. Call me naive, but I feel as though CMU is mature enough to handle something like an anonymous confessions page. Most of the reactions to LGBT issues have been genuine positivity or indifference. This campus is actually a welcoming environment, despite what the surrounding area suggests.

Luckily, and in line with what I’d predict CMU administration would do in a similar situation, UCSB leadership decided that the page fell under protected speech and avenues to shut it down.

In fact (without being too much of a cheerleader), CMU administration closed off some of the avenues that could have been pursued to shut the page down.

During the early days of the page, a CMU administrator contacted the administrator of the confessions page, telling him or her that the page would need to remove the CMU logo so it didn’t violate copyright law.

I have faith that the CMU student body won’t abuse the privilege of a miserably sophomoric and anonymous confessions page. I also have faith that CMU administration will continue to support the free speech rights of students and help this school continue to grow into an environment where every single stupid idea can still be shared.