Yik Yak is a very popular social media app amongst college students. It allows students to post anonymous messages up to 200 characters about virtually anyone and anything in their college or location. Many of the app’s users post jokes, spread news, and publicize campus events. While there is a positive side to Yik Yak, there is also a very negative one. A lot of students who use Yik Yak use it to anonymously spread rumors and bully their fellow peers with little to no reprobation. Colleges should ban the use of Yik Yak from their campuses rather than turning a blind eye to the cyber bullying epidemic.
Yik Yak was founded by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington in hopes of “Making the world feel smaller”. The app is now used on thousands of college campuses world wide. As a student of Anna Maria College, it seems impossible to make a campus of roughly 2,000 students seem any smaller but Yik Yak does it with ease. True-false information regarding upperclassman, relationship statuses and personal lives are available with a swipe of a finger. Although to many the arbitrary knowledge and rumors provided by Yik Yak may seem trivial and obsolete, it has hurt and impacted many.
I interviewed one of many students who had been posted about on Yik Yak and this is what they had to say about the app, “I feel as though, like many apps nowadays, are not used for its intended purpose. Yik Yak is no exception. Rather than reaching out to others in person, people take advantage of the anonymousness and use it to hurt other people. The yaks got so bad that I could barely focus on my school work because most of the time I was either preoccupied with refreshing my feed to see if there was anything new about me or I was trying to defend myself. I was treated like I was less of a person and more like a metaphorical punching bag. Every time there was a new post about me, I lost one more friend. It was like there was a different version of me; the one all over Yik yak and the real me, guess which one people thought I really was?”.
Colleges around the world are allowing their own students to feel like this by allowing Yik Yak on campuses. Although Yik Yak and the colleges have taken steps to prevent bullying and harassment, the option to remain anonymous on the app fuels students to spread hate because it is easier than having to own their words. It is not enough for the app just to add handles and have users agree to terms of service, just as it is not enough for schools to make their students promise to “stand against bullying”. This Yik Yak bullying epidemic is real, students everyday are being hurt and even are transferring schools because of the public libel. If colleges continue to allow this open forum for hate to continue who knows what will transpire?
