  What do college students reveal to their peers on social media under complete
anonymity? Do their campus environments relate to the topics of their
disclosure? To answer these questions, I analyze Facebook confessions pages.
Popular on hundreds of college campuses, these pages allow students to
anonymously post personal confessions on a public community forum. In this
preliminary research note, I analyze several explanatory factors of online
student confessional behavior. Aggregating nearly 200,000 confessions posts
spanning a period of 3 years, I combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with
human verification through Mechanical Turk to scalably identify topics in these
online confessions. Where possible, I also link posts to real-world news events
parsed from Twitter. I find that confessions mentioning socioeconomics as well
as mental and physical health occur more often at top-ranking, expensive
private colleges. While event-related confessions most often mention timely
school-related events, many mention global and domestic events outside of the
local campus sphere. Results suggest that undergraduates from different
campuses disclose about topics such as race, socioeonomics, and politics
differently, but in aggregate, post in similar patterns over time.
Additionally, results confirm that anonymous Facebook confessors receive
support for confessions on important, but taboo topics such as health and
socioeconomic status.
