Campus Bad News, a new service for college students to send unpleasant news anonymously, has made its mark on campus over the past month through flyers, word of mouth and campus Snapchat story features.

The service, co-founded by Darwin Skalski, a freshman double-majoring in mechanical engineering and music, and Theo Poulin, a freshman majoring in cinema, allows students to share bad news or jokes with others without delivering the message themselves. Spurred during this year’s annual LUMA Projection Arts Festival, the idea was inspired by a popular streamer, Jon Breaks Bad News.

Poulin and Skalski said they felt it was a privacy violation to record callers’ reactions.

“I think that this business can be best summarized by the core values we reference on our website — honesty, reliability and empathy,” Poulin, the organization’s chief executive officer, said. “Honesty, of course — our goal is to deliver the information we are presented with as accurately as possible. Now that doesn’t mean necessarily the information will be true, but we are going do our best to present what we have been told as accurately as possible.”

Campus Bad News has processed over 100 submissions, and several other colleges have joined the team. Poulin sends out most anonymous calls and texts, while Skalski manages the website’s design and marketing. Since founding the organization earlier this month, Poulin and Skalski have expanded their team. One of the new members is Chayn Goldberg, a freshman majoring in psychology.

“I had met Darwin and Theo and been like, ‘I want to be friends with them,’” Goldberg said. “They were like, ‘We have this idea and it’s really bad — pun intended,’ and so of course I joined. I became the H.R. person a little bit later on when they started including more and more people and trying to assign official roles, although there isn’t really a payrolled staff.”

Before joining the human resources department, Goldberg was involved in the marketing and advertising side of Campus Bad News. Goldberg will also host a short-form talk show called “No Time to Talk” with the Campus Bad News crew, set to be released on Instagram and TikTok. These one-minute videos will include a news summary, musical guests and interviews — which Goldberg said is meant to satirize “our generation’s short attention span and the medium of talk shows.”

“More and more weird things are going to happen around this campus that you should pay attention to,” Goldberg warned.

Campus Bad News is planning to hold events around campus in the upcoming months. Without revealing further details, Poulin said that the team will continue engaging in “silly endeavors,” including engineering a fully designed website that will notify students when garlic knots are available in the Chenango Champlain Collegiate Center. Despite these planned projects, Campus Bad News’ main goal remains the same — deliver bad and funny news to college students everywhere.

“We aim to facilitate communications among peers,” Skalski said. “Also, it’s just a way for college students to have some fun and [mess] with their friends. We know what people are going to use this for.”

Some of the most notable requests have been for pregnancy announcements — both real and fake — and breakups. Campus Bad News displays notable requests on their website, with the requester’s consent. Tommy Phelan, a freshman majoring in electrical engineering, used Campus Bad News to tell his roommate that he took some of their snacks without permission.

“I think other people could benefit by having good jokes with their friends or even taking a more serious matter and being able to deliver it politely,” Phelan said.