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The Highwire with Del Bigtree

GENERATION SNITCH

The Highwire with Del Bigtree

The Highwire with Del Bigtree

Health & Fitness, News, Society & Culture

4.93.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2020

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Will your college-aged kid be turned in for holding hands this semester? Students across the country are being encouraged to “tell on” their classmates if they break coronavirus safety measures. Will these snitch hotlines be weaponized by students with ill intentions? Jeffrey Jaxen dives into what the new campus environments awaiting our young people will look like this year.

Transcript

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0:00.0

College has started and the kids in these colleges, you know, again, looking at some of the

0:07.3

reporting across, really across the world. But in America specifically, the kids in these

0:12.7

colleges are being treated in my opinion like a petri dish because all of the stuff we've

0:18.0

heard during this coronavirus response of suggestions of, hey, maybe we can let people

0:23.9

download something on their app. We can track them like that. Or Mayor Eric Asetti in Los

0:29.4

Angeles, hey, citizens, snitch on your neighbors. We'll turn their water off. All of this stuff

0:34.7

is now being tried in the college university kind of microcosm of what they're looking

0:40.8

at. So the students now are being asked to snitch on their on their fellow students if they

0:48.0

see them breaking rules or acting in an unsafe matter when it comes to COVID-19. So this

0:53.5

has gotten such mainstream press that there was an opinion article written in the New York

0:59.0

Times by two professors at Cornell and they say don't make kids the coronavirus police.

1:05.8

And they say inside the reasoning, people report on one another truthfully or falsely for

1:11.4

a number of personal reasons, including competition, revenge, leverage, and everyday aggravation.

1:17.0

There's every reason to assume that these motivations will bubble up in the college context

1:21.2

too. Now I went to a couple of these, you know,

1:24.7

call them snitch portals. We have Texas A&M. The students can log directly on to the reporting

1:30.3

portal. And it says right there, if you're reporting on an individual, please keep, please

1:34.4

remember to keep all information strictly confidential. But as you go into the form, if you, if you

1:39.1

visit that, you know, it asks for their name, it asks for their address, it asks for all

1:42.3

their information. So this is, this is a fascinating time for college students and, you know, just

1:48.7

piled more stress on for them. And then I grabbed another screenshot of Yale. This is

1:53.0

Yale's reporting. And it says compliance, you know, you click that box. It's compliance

...

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