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Rutgers does not oversee its Snapchat story

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The Rutgers Snapchat story flips through short video segments submitted by anyone within the school’s geographical borders. One of the app’s new features relies on student journalists to share honest accounts of hyperlocal news. – Photo by Thomas Boniello

The Rutgers Snapchat Campus Story, contrary to popular belief, is not filtered by, or affiliated with the University.

Snapchat started the “Campus Stories” in 2014, as an expansion of an individual user's "My  
Story." The popular update allows students to upload snaps to their college’s central feed and is available to anyone who is physically within the geographical borders of the university. 

The Campus Story is a compilation of random snaps from students, with no correlation between them. From parties on College Avenue to physics lectures on Busch and former Vice President Joe Biden’s speech, the story has encompassed a wide range of moments that are displayed for viewers on the app until they expire after 24 hours. Only users who turn on their location services on Snapchat are able to view or post on the story. 

“Our Stories are collections of Snaps submitted from different Snapchatters throughout the community, collected and categorized to capture a place or event from different points-of-view ... Our Story is a place where Snapchatters can build big community narratives together,” according to the Snapchat support website

To prevent profanities and inappropriate content, the Snapchat team censors snaps submitted to community stories. Snapchat’s community guidelines report that it does not allow adult or illegal content, hate speech and spam

The snaps do not go through Rutgers when they are submitted and the University has no control over which snaps make the cut to get on the Campus Story that often gets thousands of views.

“No one on our staff has anything to do with what runs as campus stories,” said Dory Devlin, interim senior director of University News and Media Relations.

Instead, it is run purely by Snapchat employees, leaving no specific individual in charge of the filtering process.

In addition to the “Our Story,” the app continues to design new features. Recent updates include a “Do Not Disturb” button that allows users to mute notifications from a person or group without their knowledge that their snaps are being silenced. 

Snapchat is introducing more text styles shortly after Instagram added new fonts to its own version of “stories,” according to Tech Crunch. 

Snapchat also rolled out a new feature in the Discover section that relies on student journalists to share accurate, unique, hyper-localized stories, according to The Verge

The stories will be similar to those of BuzzFeed’s and The New York Times' and will be directly from college newspapers’ journalists and editors. The app soft-launched the feature with colleges like Stanford, UCLA and Dartmouth last spring, and will be expanding to more universities across the country. 


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