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Updated October 6, 2025, at 10:33 p.m.

{shortcode-429a20a43b31c14ee603587b9f7215faac9b0e1d}acemash, a website allowing visitors to rank the attractiveness of Harvard students, briefly returned to campus over the weekend, more than two decades after Facebook founder Mark E. Zuckerberg created the original version.

The site went viral on Sidechat, an anonymous social media platform limited to Harvard undergraduates, on Sunday afternoon before a pair of Harvard juniors exploited its weak security to take it down roughly two hours later. Though Facemash reappeared around 9 p.m., the site’s creator took it offline and posted a message that it was “down for maintenance” later that evening.

As of this article’s publication, the maintenance message was still posted.

During the hours it was active, Facemash drew condemnation from students who called the idea “absolutely disgusting” and said they were featured without their consent.

Visitors to the website were presented with the pictures of two Harvard affiliates and asked to click on the photo they found “hotter.” Votes were recorded and used to calculate each person’s attractiveness using Elo scores, a ranking system first used in chess that adjusts a person’s rating based on how their wins and losses compare to the strength of their opponents.

The new Facemash was created by Nirav Rohra, a senior at the University of Texas at Dallas studying computer science. He developed the website as a project for this year’s HackHarvard, an annual undergraduate hackathon that took place this past weekend.

Unlike Zuckerberg’s 2003 site, which used student ID photos scraped from internal Harvard directories, the new Facemash drew photos from public profiles on LinkedIn, a social media platform used for professional connections, and included images of men as well as women. The website branded itself as a “modern, ethical remake of the 2003 viral site.”

Because Rohra’s Facemash pulled profiles from LinkedIn, which is used to network beyond college, the website not only listed undergraduates but also included alumni, graduate students, and the chief of staff to University President Alan M. Garber ’76. The profile of at least one high school sophomore was also listed.

“All content is sourced ethically from publicly available information,” Rohra wrote on the website’s “About” page, which was active Sunday evening.

In an interview with The Crimson, Rohra said he attended HackHarvard in hopes of finding a business partner for his startup, which uses artificial intelligence to detect computer-generated text and speech.

“I thought, ‘Well, what should I make that helps me connect with other people?” Rohra said. “I wanted to make something that connects with LinkedIn and with Harvard.”

“I remember Mark Zuckerberg and all of this was connected, so I’m like, ‘What if I recreate Facemash?’” Rohra added.

The new Facemash closely replicated the appearance of the original site, down to the message beneath its header.

“Were we let in for our looks? No,” it read. “Will we be judged on them? Yes.”

When Zuckerberg created the original Facemash in 2003, he hacked into online directories for nine of the 12 undergraduate houses and uploaded the photos to his website. In addition to facing fierce backlash from campus student groups, Zuckerberg was accused of violating privacy and breaching copyright agreements by the Harvard College Administrative Board.

But it is unclear whether Rohra, who does not have any ties to Harvard, or HackHarvard will face any disciplinary action for the website’s creation. College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the new Facemash violated College policies.

Rohra said he used Puppeteer, a JavaScript library which enables users to automatically run scripts on web pages, to scrape LinkedIn profiles. He then cleaned the dataset to mainly include Harvard affiliates with class years from 2025 to 2029.

He said people at the HackHarvard hackathon, including the Harvard students running the event, gave him positive feedback on his idea when he gave them a demonstration on Saturday.

“I went to HackHarvard’s organizers,” he said, “and they loved it.”

Hugo Nunez ’26, one of HackHarvard’s directors, wrote in an email on Monday that the project was “not endorsed by or representative of HackHarvard or its values.” He added in a later statement that organizers disqualified Facemash from being judged during the awards process, but not immediately after Rohra submitted his project online.

“Since we can’t filter all of them for plagiarism/code of conduct/etc in the moment, disqualification is enforced during judging/deliberation when making considerations for awards,” Nunez wrote. “Facemash was removed from the deliberation process as reflected by the judging CSV files.”

HackHarvard manually changed the spreadsheet and did not have a written and timestamped record that the organization could make available to The Crimson, Nunez wrote. Rohra said on Monday that HackHarvard organizers did not inform him of the disqualification.

On Monday morning, after this article’s publication, Jonathan Gottfried, a co-founder of Major League Hacking — an organization that helps run student hackathons and sponsors HackHarvard — sent Rohra an email informing him that Facemash had violated the event’s code of conduct.

“Rating individuals based on physical attractiveness is inherently objectifying and creates a sexualized environment, which is not appropriate for hackathons,” Gottfried wrote. “Additionally, using people’s photos without their consent for such a use case constitutes harassment and a violation of their privacy.”

When Rohra’s website made its way to Harvard’s broader student body on Sunday, it drew similar condemnation.

After learning about Facemash’s return from a friend, two Harvard juniors with computer science experience decided to take matters into their own hands, calling the website’s premise “sexual harassment, definitionally.”

The two students were granted anonymity to discuss their effort to take down the website because they feared potential legal repercussions.

The juniors realized that Rohra had not encrypted the database tallying each person’s votes, enabling them to edit the information stored within it. They wrote a program that cleared the votes and replaced each person’s picture with a black square, making the website inoperable.

Rohra said the dataset consisted of 1,560 LinkedIn profiles. The two juniors said 44,000 votes had been cast and 870 LinkedIn profiles were listed at the time they took the website down.

Less than an hour later, Facemash was back — this time with additional security. Shortly before midnight, the website disappeared again, displaying the “down for maintenance” message under a “Facemash” header.

Still, the complete dataset — including individual students’ Elo scores, vote breakdowns, and rankings — could be accessed by anyone who entered a single line of code into their computer’s command line for a span of several hours on Sunday. A spreadsheet of the data was circulated on Sidechat Sunday night.

Laura B. Martens ’27, a Crimson Arts editor who was listed on Facemash, said she was disgusted by the website and called the effort to bring it down an act of “vigilante brilliance.”

“The whole idea of literally comparing photos of women, it’s just — I thought we’d moved past this as a society,” she said.

Eunice S. Chon ’25-’26 said she found the website’s claim that the design was ethical to be “ironic in a pretty jarring way.”

“I have never put any of my content with the intention of being judged for my physical appearance,” she said. “I think it’s offensive in every way possible.”

Rohra said he understood that some people might have privacy concerns and was open to making changes if needed.

“That’s our top priority,” he said. “If they don’t want to be included in that stuff, I would generally just remove them from the database.”

When Facemash returned after being taken down by the two Harvard juniors, the website contained a new page where users could request to be removed. But upon submitting the removal form, users were greeted with an error message.

When asked if he would consider bringing Facemash back, Rohra said he would “leave it to the public opinion.”

“If I get a majority of people saying that, ‘Hey, we don’t want it,’ it doesn’t make sense for me to keep it up,” he said. “And if the public wants it, then, yeah, maybe we could develop something that people are actually interested in using.”

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.