UCF freshman biology major Carlos Tapia came to UCF as a self-admitted introvert.
He was tired of it and high school was in the rear-view mirror. It was time for a change.
“I thought why not change things up? I thought of college as a stepping stone for a new outlook and new opportunities,” Tapia said.
He looked to the internet as that starting point by joining the “UCF Class of 2018” Facebook page, sometimes making multiple posts in the group per day about everything from his vast fedora collection to videos of wild animals he found while longboarding around campus.
The profile picture of Carlos donning a red fedora and aviator sunglasses was almost always at the top of the group, which has over 7,000 members. Before long, he was getting recognized around campus.
“Way too much,” Tapia said. “I find it a very neat thing that social media has changed the world so much that you can post a bunch of things and people begin to know you more.”
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The unexpected pseudo-celebrity status Tapia reached within the group did not come without backlash. Some of the users on the page thought his posting was irrelevant to the group and was becoming annoying. Freshman engineering major Josh Patterson was very vocal about Tapia’s postings on the page, often getting into arguments with Tapia on the page.
“Everyone is sick of seeing his posts all the time and that’s why me and many people try to get through to him all the time to stop posting so much,” Patterson said.
While Patterson has just told Tapia to slow down on the postings, some people have tried different ways. A photo of Tapia’s face photoshopped in a toilet bowl and a photoshopped picture of Tapia appearing to be holding a bong were both posted on the page.
The administrator of the “Class of 2018” Facebook page, Hugo Cardona, has seen the backlash Carlos has faced for his frequent posting and subsequently has blocked about 20 people from using the page.
“Ultimately, you can’t please everyone all of the time so you have to make sure to keep the main thing the main thing; which is keeping the page a spam-free resource that all UCF freshmen can leverage to their advantage,” Cardona said.
After seeing the postings, Tapia has kept a positive attitude.
“I really don’t take it personally, most of the time I just go on there, read it, chuckle a few times and post some kind of meme on there,” Tapia said.
KnightNews.com reached out to Samantha Harris at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, to get an expert’s opinion on whether the negative postings towards Tapia are constituted as cyber-bullying.
“FIRE believes that to pass constitutional muster, policies on bullying/cyberbullying must define those terms as peer harassment, which is conduct so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that the victim is essentially denied access to the university’s educational opportunities,” Harris said. “It is difficult to see how a few isolated social network posts would rise to this level, but a harassment determination is very contextual: if the posts happened frequently enough and over a long enough period of time that the targeted student began to avoid going to class, changed his routes to avoid seeing people he knew were engaged in the behavior, etc., then the analysis might look different.”
Tapia said he believes some of these postings are considered cyber-bullying and has sent some of the collected screenshots to Student Conduct, but has not heard anything back.
Despite the controversy, Tapia feels like his posting has brought him out of his shell–and many other UCF freshmen as well.
“It’s incredible how many people I’ve met since I started. I never knew I would be meeting so many people within the first three weeks of the college career,” Tapia said.
Tapia’s personal Facebook page is filled with new friends suggesting to check out new fedoras and multiple photos of him hanging out with other UCF students around campus.
“I plan to continue getting people out there and get people involved on campus. I’ve helped a lot of people meet each other through Facebook and I want to continue to do that,” Tapia said.
