Exposing “@exposingrbk”
Who is this mysterious muckraker, and where have they gone?
@exposingrbk has been shut down multiple times.
Aspiring to be the Julian Assange of our generation, @exposingrbk popped into everyone’s Instagram discover page less than a week ago.
The account requested its followers to send in instances of injustice among the district’s staff and students, and then posted the direct messages anonymously. Needless to say, @exposingrbk quickly gained clout.
It also got a bit out of hand.
Title IX violation accusations, conspiracies concerning a staff member’s death, and innumerable typos plagued the account. Camdyn Rakow, RHS ’22, had this to say about the nature of its submissions: “Some of those DMs genuinely concerned me.”
Inevitably, after about three days of exponential growth, @exposingrbk’s page was disabled by Instagram.
Not so inevitably, however, it returned to cyberspace the very next day claiming it had been reported. Then, in the blink of an eye, the account was disabled yet again.
The question we are how faced with is: Why does this kind of free-for-all, anonymous exposé resonate so much with our students? And if @exposingrbk never returns, will a new iteration of the page simply appear in our feeds a few weeks from now?
No matter the answer, Dr. Davenport has made clear that an anonymous tip-line will be opened, so that students will have the ability to air their grievances without fear of repercussion.
Whether or not this is an indirect response to the muckraking work of @exposingrbk has yet to be confirmed, but it is one positive implementation that RHS students can look forward to.
