Ad
The Intersect
How do you solve a problem like
Yik Yak?




By Caitlin Dewey October 7 


Advertisement
Follow
@caitlindewey
Students on the Towson University campus last May. Towson was, last
week, the setting for a school-shooting scare that played out on the
anonymous app Yik Yak. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post)
The anonymous Web often gets a bad rap: Ask.fm has long
been a haven for teenage bullies, 4chan is the source of
some of the Internet’s grimmest shenanigans, and — just
this week — the secret-sharing app Whisper became the
new hunting ground of Internet deviants out trawling for
nudes.
And yet, of all the anonymous apps and Web sites
promising safe spaces for users to spill their souls, perhaps
none has proved so consistently problematic — so
apparently irredeemable — as Yik Yak, the scourge of
campuses from California to Concord, N.H.

3
In the past
(Yik Yak)
week alone,
more than a dozen high schools and universities have had
high-profile incidents with the app. A college in New
Jersey is pursuing disciplinary action against students who
spread a sex tape via Yik Yak without the subject’s
permission. Two students at the University of Southern
Mississippi were charged with felonies over posts made to
Yik Yak in late September. In Atlanta, the city where Yik
Yak is headquartered, Emory University’s student
government just passed a resolution denouncing the app
as “a platform for hate speech or harassment.”
Meanwhile, just an hour north of D.C., an 18-year-old
freshman at Towson University was arrested and charged
for promising a “Virginia Tech Part 2” on Oct. 4 in an
anonymous Yik Yak post. University police have found no
evidence that the student planned to carry out his threat,
but he’ll still face two charges of threatening to commit a
violent crime and willfully disturbing school activities, a
misdemeanor. An administrative review board will also
determine his enrollment status at the school; while still
The Most Popular All
technically a student, he isn’t allowed on campus.
Over
“It seems to have been posted in a moment of anger and
frustration,” said Ray Feldmann, Towson’s director of
communications. “But we’re in an environment now, a
post-Virginia Tech world, where you just can’t make
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
St. Louis restaurant owner wounds
one robber, maybe two
THE WASHINGTON POST
threats like that. There’s no such thing as a hoax or a
Cruz aims to take on Obama if GOP
wins Senate; won't vow...
prank.”
SALON
Happy Halloween: Actual PhDs
respond to Amazon's...
This was not,
incidentally,
(Yik Yak)
Towson’s first run-in with the app since it began gaining
national traction in January of this year. Last spring, the
Our Online Games
university was also forced to convene meetings with
Play right from this page
representatives from campus Greek organizations and the
Spider Solitaire
messages on the app.
Genre(s): Card
Spider Solitaire is known as the king of
all solitaire games!
That coincides with similar incidents in Chicago, where
52 card pickup
abuse on the app became so severe that Yik Yak decided to
Genre(s): Card
Pick up cards as fast as you can!
Office of Student Affairs over a spate of nasty, bullying
suspend operations in the area. Or Concord, N.H., where a
group of students became so horrified with the contents of
the app that they taped uplifting anonymous messages to
hundreds of student lockers, a kind of anti-Yik Yak meant
to “react to negativity.”
Genre(s): Card
Reveal cards as you clear your way to
the top!
Carniball
Just this morning, a college in eastern Pennsylvania
alerted students that a credible Yik Yak threat had been
made at the school; an 18-year-old student was later
arrested for posting that he was going to shoot the people
who “bully me every single day.”
What, exactly, do users see in this seething slimepit? More
to the point, what do investors see in it? Yik Yak is just shy
of a year old — the app launched quietly last November,
before exploding among students early this year — and it’s
already raised more than $10 million in funding, much of
it from the Chinese social giant Renren.
The theoretical
(Yik Yak)
Tri-Peaks Solitaire
appeal of Yik
Yak is in two things: total anonymity and close proximity.
Unlike most other anonymous-sharing apps, Yik Yak asks
for virtually no personal information on sign-up. (Case in
Genre(s): Arcade
This amusment park classic will bring
back some joyous memories
point: When Towson investigated its campus threat, it
could only get the poster’s phone number from Yik Yak
— campus police had to contact his cellphone provider to
get an actual name.) The app also only displays messages
sent within a 1.5-mile radius, which guarantees that
whatever “secrets” (or jokes or spurious gossip) you’re
reading happened at your school. The vast majority of
posts are one-line witticisms on typically collegiate things:
a bad midterm, a bad roommate, a bad hangover.
“Many people at UB use Yik Yak to express their thoughts
and feelings,” one student gushed to the University at
Buffalo’s campus paper this week. “Yik Yak shows us when
other people [are experiencing] or feeling the same way
that we do, which is pretty cool.”
The problem, of
course, is when
(Yik Yak)
Yik Yak shows other things, which it does with astounding
frequency: Hurtful gossip or slander about specific
students, a la the departed JuicyCampus; threats of
violence, some of them credible; outright cries for help.
These types of posts have become so common, in fact, that
the fresh-faced, class-of-’13 founders behind it have
drastically scaled back their original strategy: initially
launching nationwide, then restricting the app just to
college campuses, and finally promising a “geofence” — or
block — to any school that asks for it. Oddly, the one thing
Yik Yak has not done is moderate proactively: Users can
“flag” yaks as inappropriate, but it’s unclear what happens
to those flags and how quickly they’re addressed.
None of this bodes well for Yik Yak’s grand ambition,
which is to become a kind of hyperlocal news and
community network — think the coffee shop cork board for
the digital age. The problem with that analogy, of course, is
that some barista presumably watches the IRL cork board
for rude and/or offensive fliers. And people thumbtacking
a notice in a public space are still obligated to follow
certain social norms. And few people — to my knowledge,
at least? — casually take to the community bulletin board
when they’re lonely or angry or vengeful or drunk or
otherwise predisposed to writing something terrible.
“We didn’t hear about Yik Yak much until last week,”
Towson’s Feldmann said, with a slight sigh. “You know
how these apps go: They pop up, they cool off.”
Here’s hoping this one cools.
Caitlin Dewey runs The Intersect blog, writing about
digital and Internet culture. Before joining the Post,
she was an associate online editor at Kiplinger’s
Personal Finance.