‘Red cup’ and ‘almost Friday’: Instagram accounts showcase teen drunken debauchery in Kansas

Come along with me down a rabbit hole.

“What will we see?” you ask.

This rabbit hole serves up a social media torrent of college bar fights and late-night make-out sessions. Endless memes about college football and Kansas campus life. High school parties with drunk teens slumped over toilets. Little girls who compete as competitive dancers posting cringey photos of each other. Government warnings about deadly opioids. Instagram accounts that lock out parents.

So much underage drinking caught by the eye of cellphone cameras.

Welcome to “almost Friday” and “red cup,” the social media celebrations of teen debauchery on Instagram. With tens of thousands of followers, the accounts post the profane and absurd moments of teenage life in Kansas and nationwide.

My trip through the dreck of teenage social media this week provided an unexpected lesson, demonstrating what young people trust online — and how young and innocent they are when they begin imitating it.

Like most internet rabbit holes, this one started with a single innocent click. The headline came from the University of Kansas student newspaper, the University Daily Kansan: “Health officials watch for cychlorphine, Red Cup posts campus alert.”

The link baited me twice. I wanted to know what this mysterious new substance was. But I also was curious why “redcupkansas,” a social media account focused on the college party scene, was being cited as an authority by the campus publication, like a stand-in for the local health department.

The featured image at the top of the Kansan’s article provides a screen grab from the “redcupkansas” account on Instagram. Originally posted by “redcupkansas” a few weeks ago, the warning — in the form of three pages of text — warns about cychlorphine, an opioid creating alarm because of its potency and difficulty in being detected. 

(The truth about cychlorphine is murky. A national threat notice from the White House Office of National Drug Policy warns that the drug is difficult to detect and dangerously potent. The federal notice links to a county media release from Tennessee that says “the drug was included in the toxicology in 41 deaths” during an eight-month period. However, a map notes that only 10 states, not including Kansas, have detected cychlorphine.)

In the “redcupkansas” alert, the first page of text misspells its headline, “Campus Safty Alert,” which undercuts its supposed authority on emerging American health crises. I scoffed at the amateurism of the “alert,” the lack of journalistic gravitas that “redcupkansas” demands.

My wife smartly brought me back to the real world.

“Maybe that is the perfect place for a warning like that,” she said.

To her point, the “redcupkansas” page has gained more followers than the Kansan’s Instagram account.

Of course, she is right. The post on “redcupkansas” has collected almost 5,000 likes, many from college students who love partying. The comments (in addition to profanity and namecalling) include invitations to two Lawrence locations that provide free fentanyl testing strips as well as Narcan Nasal Spray, an antidote for opioid overdoses.

But I also couldn’t shake the hypocrisy.

Literally the next post on “redcupkansas” celebrates a limp man being dragged down the sidewalk on Massachusetts Street, seemingly blacked out from a night of weekend drinking. Click a few more times to find a video of Lawrence Police cuffing a man at a bar, surrounded by stumbling onlookers. Two more clicks provide a student, falling hard, likely from a drunken handstand, on KU’s Jayhawk Boulevard. His body thuds to the concrete in an endless loop.

One more click gives you a young man standing at the bar, taking a shot and welcoming a cup of water thrown in his face. Then the bartender slaps him hard to his cheek. The people watching in the bar whoop with surprise and excitement.

With that single post from just one weekend, “redcupkansas” provides 15 glimpses — both silly and shocking — into problematic drinking at KU. The account’s profile invites users to “DM submissions to be featured,” followed by an emoji of two beer steins.

Weekend recaps dot the grid of the account as far back as you can scroll, to the first post in 2023. These hundreds of drunken nights (along with memes about the weather and the drag of doing homework) are followed by more than 23,000 people, providing thousands of enthusiastic likes. 

All of this beer-soaked, social-media bravado sits sour with me. As a college instructor, I see young people struggle with drinking every semester. Last year a student from more than 10 years ago reached out to apologize for coming to my lecture hall drunk, forcing me to throw him out of class. He said the college party scene had ruined his life for years until he got sober.

The last thing college students need is another nudge toward binge drinking.

Yet the “redcup” account is not unique to KU or to college life. 

To kick off last academic year, an account celebrating Manhattan drinking culture revived itself for Kansas State University students. The account “redcupksu” posted: “WE ARE OFFICIALLY BACK!! If it’s happening at K-State, you’ll see it here first. Welcome to the Wild side.”

On recent weekends, it seems that the “redcupksu” account sent a photographer to local bars to gather party pics. (Most of them are much tamer than posts on “redcupkansas.”)

Other college campuses have their own “red cup” accounts, mixing college football mania with late-night mistakes. The account for the University of Texas celebrated its followers — “30,000 of you beautiful people” — with a post on Instagram. Scroll down to find an image of a man passed out cradling two liquor bottles.

Above his head arches the text: “Finally Friday.”

That phrase brings nostalgia for college students. “Almost Friday” social accounts remain a staple of high school life in America. Here in Kansas and across the country, the high school students maintaining these accounts, one for each school, most often hide the content by only allowing approved people to view their posts.

(You should have seen the look of “no way” on my son’s face when I asked to see his school’s “almost Friday” account. However, he reassured me, “It’s not as bad as other schools.”)

Some “almost Friday” accounts, like one aimed at students from Shawnee Mission South, are brazenly open to the public.

These “almost Friday” accounts playfully note in their bios that they are “not affiliated with” their school, making it even more alluring for students to follow the account, while seemingly shielding the person hosting the account from discipline by school administrators.

Like high school itself, these accounts are more vicious and immature than the college ones. Students can exact revenge on their rivals by posting their most embarrassing moments from a Saturday night house party or a backseat make-out.

From the vantage point of a middle-age parent who grew up without social media, it’s almost impossible to imagine how completely this could turn your teenage life inside out.

Imagine seeing your image in a vulnerable — if not powerless — moment, posted to Instagram, a platform that your friends treasure, the footage of your personal embarrassment looping endlessly on the internet.

We wonder why our young people show increased signs of anxiety. You don’t need to imagine yourself being showcased on these platforms to make yourself a nervous wreck. You only need to hold out the possibility of being featured.

Each cellphone camera in your life threatens to embarrass you. Each high school party presents a potential trap. Each silly dare you accept could appear on an “almost Friday” account.

Such a possibility every day is enough to send young people cycling with reputational dread.

That’s why my final stop in my rabbit hole tour will remain with me even more vividly than the college “red cup” accounts or the high school “almost Friday” accounts.

While I was searching for Kansas high schools that were public on Instagram, I found an account called “almostfridayspac.” When I clicked, I found many of the same features: embarrassing photos headlined in white type with “finally friday” or “almost friday” in a signature serifed font. Each posting in the grid led to a gallery — photo after photo, week after week.

However, there were a few differences in this account. There was no obscene language or binge drinking. After all, this was an account maintained by a youth dance studio in Lenexa.

The other striking difference was the age of the girls posing (or sometimes wincing) in front of the camera. Many appeared to be middle schoolers or younger, members of the dance teams and classes at Starstruck Performing Arts Center in Lenexa. From their tiny perch in elementary school, they were already performing for the social media lens. They were already being exposed in their most embarrassing moments.

A decade away from drinking age, their faces and antics were precociously celebrating that it was “finally Friday.” Let’s hope that, rather than reviving the account (it has been idle for almost two years), they delete it.

It’s possible that many of these Kansas dance girls didn’t even know what the phrase meant. They might be shielded from its link to viral college partying and high school embarrassment.

Unfortunately, it seems inevitable that they will find out soon, perhaps going down their own Instagram rabbit hole. And when they do, they may be rehearsed — not just in their dance routines, but in the American social media culture of late-night party humiliation.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.