Gurpreet Banwait
Contributor
Students searching for the website for the new CFS campaign to reduce student debt may instead find themselves on an anti-CFS web site encouraging them to defederate from the national student union.
Educationisaright.com is one of several new websites that simultaneously criticizes and ridicules the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) while hiding behind the veil of anonymity offered by the internet.
The name of the dot-com address is an allusion to educationisaright.ca, the site actually created by the CFS to highlight its new campaign to increase federal postsecondary education funding and make education more accessible.
The creators of education- isaright.com, who do not identify themselves on the site, parody the actual page by closely mimicking their style and using their logo, though they’ve replaced the message to reduce student debtwith references to the cost of CFS membership fees.
Dave Molenhuis, national chair of the CFS, said that he is not going to speculate about who is behind the website, but he assumes the people who created it are in opposition to the CFS.
Another, older anti-CFS web- site, takebackyourschool.wordpress.com, employs the same tactic as educationisaright.com. The editors of the website are also unknown, but publish anti-CFS material regularly.
If the comments on takebackyourschool.wordpress.com are any indication, the site receives a fair amount of attention, but some York students are not happy websites like these exist. Cadie Lowe, a third-year business student, said she thinks people are too interested in gossip these days.
“People are so interested in the bad gossip and bad news, they are going to follow that more than the good stuff that the organization does,” said Lowe. “Nobody will listen to good stuff if somebody is talking crap about the organization.”
The CFS is not the only organization caught in online battles.
In another virtual snafu, York University’s official twitter account, @yorkuniversity, recently recommended its 4,900 followers follow @YFSglobalPR, a bogus twitter account that claims to represent the York Federation of Students (YFS) but in fact satirizes their campaigns and decisions.
According to Keith Marnoch, associate director of media relations at York, the university randomly chooses Twitter accounts that they recommend students follow, and that there is no hidden meaning in the university tweeting about the @ YFSglobalPR.
“We are not providing validation,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to start and engage in conversations with the community. YFSglobalPR should not be viewed differently from other people and organizations that we follow.”
A university relations team co- ordinates York’s official twitter ac- count, Marnoch added.
Krisna Saravanamuttu, president of the YFS, decried the false account, calling its coordinators “a group of individuals who choose to take time out of their day to promote misinformation about the work and activities of the YFS.”
“It’s inappropriate and quite immature for an institution the size of York University to be promoting misinformation about the work of the YFS.”
Not every opposition group criticizing student unions does so anonymously, however. The creators of the Facebook group “Students Against the Canadian Federation of Students” don’t mind identifying themselves, and have chosen to embrace the internet as an effective tool to propagate their views. The group currently has over 1,300 members, and still regularly updates their wall.
