Illustration by Shina Kang

Who do you complain to when you want to rant about the MacLean cafeteria food? Who do you tell when you talk to that cute girl in your sculpture class that no one knows you have a crush on?

For many students, the places to voice the best, worst, weirdest or most annoying parts about being a School of the Art Institute of Chicago student are anonymous social media accounts where they can “confess” anything they want to get off their chest. The two most popular accounts on Instagram, the platform where this style of dialogue gets its day, are @_saic_confessions and @saic_confessions.

School confession accounts, for colleges and high schools, are a phenomenon that took off in 2013. At that time, they were mostly in the form of Facebook groups and pages. 

At SAIC there is a large range of opinions in regards to these accounts. Some students and the people who run them see the accounts as well intentioned, funny places to share student gossip. Others feel that the student confession pages lead to harassment, cyberbullying, and invasion of privacy. 

In general, the way these accounts work is through student submissions in DMs or on Google Forms. After the accounts receive confessions, the users who operate the accounts will parse through and post the confessions they choose. The accounts are based on anonymity. The people running them are anonymous. The people confessing are anonymous, which in theory allows for more honest or sensitive information to be shared. Each account has its own identity, self-imposed rules, and reputation.

The @saic_confessions account, currently recognizable to students by its “Sailor Moon” aesthetic, has been active since 2019 and has strict guidelines about not posting any names in confessions and keeping them lighthearted and about spilling tea rather than starting real discourse or drama. The @saic_confessions account had 1,337 followers at the time this article was written.

Meanwhile, @_saic_confessions, a similarly named but separate account, is recognizable by the dark green text on a ligjt background in its posts. As of 2024, @_saic_confessions is the more active of the current confession pages with more than 1,500 posts and 728 followers at the time this article was written. Despite its lower follower count, @_saic_confessions seems to be the more notorious of the two accounts among the current student body. According to one of the people running the account, known as Bubbles (from the emoji they use to identify themselves on Instagram), this is the second version of this account. The first was allegedly taken down by Instagram for posting professors’ full names. Bubbles said that the original account had around 1,000 followers. They also noted they now blur names in their posts, unless the post is deemed positive, to avoid having their account reported again.

There are other, low-engagement “confession” accounts as well. Some, like @saic.shady.confessions, are built mostly on meme culture, while others, like @saic_uncensored, build their brand entirely off of posting confessions completely uncurated and uncensored.

Two of the people behind @saic_confessions, who asked to stay anonymous aside from the initial they used to identify themselves on their shared account, talked about the types of confessions they receive. 

“Sometimes we get people confessing their crushes or lovers, people that they’ve slept with. More relationship-type things. There’s stuff about teachers and professors. Of course, Ms. Tenny [SAIC President Elissa Tenny] is always being talked about. We have lots of confessions about the food being trash. Roommate drama,” said A. 

A added that people often confess doing “weird things” that they feel they can’t tell other people, including their friends.

Much of the content on all the confession accounts is fairly crude. A point of particular interest is what goes on in the bathrooms at SAIC, whether the confession deals with bodily movements or sexual activity. It isn’t unusual to find posts about bowel movements, farting, or similar moments from SAIC confessors. The sexual content involves both self-play and scenarios with partners. The cruder the content for the post, the more likes the post received.

Crushes are another popular confession. Some of these posts are relatively innocent, posing questions to the community like, “Who’s the sexy new blonde girl?” as one confessor queried on @_saic_confessions. While blondeness might be enough to retain anonymity, often these posts withholding names contain enough information to identify specific students. 

Other posts go further, outlining specific sexual urges confessors would like to carry out with other students, whose names are usually obscured on @saic_confessions, but occasionally remain visible on less lewd posts. 

Many posts on @_saic_confessions do contain first names, although it is unclear whether these names have been altered by the operators. Many of the posts revealing names fall into the crush category. “Nora is so gorgeous,” confesses someone on @_saic_confessions.

There are also many remarks about the SAIC community in the content of posts on these accounts. Some posts can be seen as relatable, containing observations about professors, student debt and more, while others can be seen as disparaging, containing overt critiques of other students or aspects of SAIC culture. 

“Everyone here is so goddamn cliquey. Like ok sorry I don’t have 800 tooth gems and knit my own clothes and smoke 30 pounds of weed that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends,” wrote one confessor on @saic_confessions. 

“Lot of fashion students are so fucking rude especially the cis white ones, you all need to get off your high horse – from fashion student <3,” another wrote.

Mark Gatz (BFAAE 2025) said he had low opinion about the confession accounts; but when asked if he’s ever sent a confession, he said that he had because of “loneliness.”

Loneliness was a topic also brought up by the monitors of @saic_confessions. 

“We get a lot of confessions talking about how lonely people are and how they want to make friends, or you know, how isolated they feel at school,” said A. 

Content sometimes creates a forum to connect artists and students. There are posts asking about cheap nail techs, hair stylists and more. The comments on these posts often contain links to artists’ Instagrams dedicated to their art or business. These posts can be a place to find a sought-out service for cheap while supporting student artists and artisans.

With so much of the content on anonymous confession pages being devoted to talking about specific students, as innocent and anonymous as this content is supposed to be, a question arises. What do SAIC students think about these accounts?

“I blocked them because I don’t want to see potential posts about me or someone I know again. Some of the posts are literal bullying for people who don’t deserve it. There’s one or two examples where that person did deserve it because they did something terrible, but that’s a different story,” said Jordan Alston (BFA 2024).

Alston added that while every school has its flaws, and that those flaws ought to be discussed, this isn’t the most conducive forum.

“Some people complain for the sake of complaining. Not all, but a majority of the posts I’ve seen. They don’t seem to look at the bigger picture of the U.S. education system, society as a whole, and what we can do about it. SAIC is not the best, but it’s not as awful as several people say it is,” Alston said. 

Others said the accounts were inconsequential.

“I feel like it would be no great loss if they disappeared from the internet. No personal ill-will to the people running them, of course, but I see very little value in these accounts as they presently exist. About half of it is horny posting which I do not care to see,” said Milo Simpson (BFAW 2025).

Simpson was especially off-put by interpersonal posts among students.  

“Whatever happened to romance? I don’t want to know about the graphic sexual acts you want to perform with your peers and/or professors. Did they consent to being talked about publicly this way? Even if anonymous and dramatized for ‘fun,’ this 1,000 percent feels like sexual harassment of some kind,” said Simpson. 

Simpson said he thought that it’s possible for this kind of account to exist harmlessly, but not for long; sooner or later, someone is bound to get hurt. Kyle Robateau (BFA 2025) echoed these sentiments.

“It’s cyberbullying and it’s gross and dangerous and makes me not trust my peers. I see people making sexual comments about other students, I’ve had a friend get doxxed. I’ve seen horrible rumors spread. It has happened to friends that mind their own business and don’t do anything and makes me fear that they’ll post about me next,” said Robateau.

It’s clear that some portion of the student body engages with these accounts regularly, while others feel uncomfortable or angry about them. 

“We get a lot of confessions. There are at least a thousand confessions in our form. So we can’t really post all of them. We do pick and choose some,” said S, A’s co-runner of the account, who joined A to talk about how they try to avoid posting things that are mean, looking instead for more fun, gossip-worthy confessions.

Bubbles said their account gets around 50 submissions a day.

“Names are blurred, and if you have a problem with the post, DM us, and we’ll take it down. The other rules I just come up with as I go. Like, no hate speech. Yeah, it’s really just, don’t give hateful speech a place. It’s supposed to be fun and silly,” said Bubbles.

When asked what confession pages provide to the SAIC community, Bubbles, S, and A were hesitant. 

“Not sure. I think I’ve never really thought about that. It’s not really something I do for other people. It’s kind of fun to run it. I originally started it because my friend posted on his close friend’s story that we need an SAIC confession, and I was like, ‘Bet, I’ll do it.’ And I did it. So here we are,” said Bubbles. 

“I’m not really sure. Maybe change of policy in case someone has been doing something, so they need to be more secure. That’s all I can think of,” said S. 

“I think that people get a safe place where they can vent, where they can talk shit, talk into the void about whatever random problems they might have about things where they feel like they can’t share with other people. I think the confession Instagram is just a lighthearted place where you can have a laugh, listen to some of the crazy things that other people have done to make yourself feel better. A little bit of solidarity and community, ” said A.     

A and S said that they’ve never had any problems with the administration intervening with their account, but said they knew a different confessions account did. 

Bubbles mentioned that their original account was reported and taken down by Instagram, and they personally suspect the report was made by the administration. 

“Over the years, there have been scores and scores of student-run social media accounts, websites, newsletters, and other communications channels, and most fizzle out over time. Because students do not need permission to establish an account, we do not keep track of student-run channels, and they are not actively monitored by the school. Because we don’t monitor student accounts, we’re unlikely to see the posts organically, but we do have processes in place to address our community’s concerns once they’re brought to our attention,” said Bree Witt, the executive director of marketing and communications at SAIC.