On Wednesday morning, Residential Education administrators removed a Kappa Sigma website hyperlink, listed on Stanford’s Fraternity & Sorority Life webpage, that redirected users to PornHub, a pornography website. Kappa Sigma denies involvement in the redirect. 

“Unfortunately, our domain registration expired, at which point it went back up for sale,” wrote Andy Feis ’18, president of Kappa Sigma, in an email to The Daily Thursday. “Someone then purchased the domain and set up the redirect. This doesn’t reflect our values as an organization, and we’re working with ResEd to resolve it.”

As of Thursday evening, the URL “stanfordkappasigma.org” still redirects to the pornography website.

An anonymous tipster wrote an email to Assistant Dean of Residential Education and Fraternity and Sorority Life Director Amanda Rodriguez on Tuesday night explaining what he called a “prank” and a “disgusting violation.” He suggested that Stanford remove the link, calling the videos on PornHub degrading to women.

Residential Education officials have not said who is responsible for redirecting the URL.

In an email to the tipster, Rodriguez expressed confusion as to how Pornhub was linked, given that students do not have access to Stanford’s Residential Education website and therefore do not control hyperlinks.

In a statement to The Daily on Wednesday afternoon, Rodriguez said that she was following up with the chapter to determine what happened.

“Although our Res Ed site is maintained by our webmaster we link to other sites, in this case a student managed organization site which is a third party site that appears to have been compromised,” she wrote.

Administrators changed the hyperlink from “stanfordkappasigma.org” to “kappasigma.org,” the website for the fraternity’s national chapter.

 

Contact Courtney Douglas at ccd4 ‘at’ stanford.edu.