Yik Yak is about as good for college students as allowing a verbal purge. As much as the app is a nice place for people to anonymously express their opinions without repercussions, it is also a place where people can feel attacked. Sure, the app gives great opportunity for typically shy people to shine, but is that worth the opposite end of the spectrum where the app is giving the opportunity to people to ruin peoples’ self-esteems, reputations, and more?
Now, Yik Yak deserves some credit, because they do try to maintain the amount of inappropriate and harassing posts there are on the app, but that does not mean it keeps the posts away entirely. The use of certain words prompt a message that cautions the poster that what they said may be seen as a threat or inappropriate to Yik Yak or law enforcement, and asks if they really want to continue to post what they said or not. With that said though, the user can still select that he or she thinks the post is appropriate and choose to continue to post it even after being given this warning.
If the user decides to ignore the warning, this can then lead to people being upset by the yak. When Yik Yak first reached my college, it was an exciting new thing, but quickly it became something I wanted no part of. The negative posts seemed to fill the feed, while any positive post was getting down voted so quickly by users that is was removed. Do we really want our campuses to be filled with negativity and hate instead of positivity and acceptance?
Some college students feed off of apps that cause havoc like Yik Yak tends to do, and even though nobody, unless they tell others, will know they are the ones who created the posts, they will still feel accomplished because their posts will get so much attention. “Anonymous forum, whether ones that are localized like this, or even comment sections, provides a forum for people who are essentially mean psychopaths to activate that part of themselves. It legitimizes it,” said Penn State media studies Professor Matthew Jordan. This puts students at a disadvantage, because those negative posters will only continue to speak harshly and hurtfully towards others, and maybe even at some point towards the students encouraging the posts as well.
Though Yik Yak is supposed to be a community policed app, instead college students tend to be encouraging the negative posts. In my experience with the app, yaks that were crude and demeaning towards others were the posts with the most up votes. On the other hand, positive and inspiring yaks were being down voted within seconds of being posted, and were removed from the Yik Yak feed before the yak even had a chance to reach more than those five people needed to get it removed. Anytime this is pointed out though, students do not tend to care because they will not see any repercussions for posting such things.
Is community policing on the app really doing anything? Are students really stepping up and calling people out for their cruelty? Some say that because the app is anonymous, more people will stand up and stop the bullying from occurring. As much as I want to believe that to be true, the more people who try to stop the cruelty or stand up for others the more other users make sure to remove those comments immediately. College students are encouraging their fellow peers’ cruelty towards others. Having a way to anonymously bully others is not as great as college students think.
Yes, this means that users could get away with your mean words and possibly not be punished for them, but that does not mean the people being bullied aren’t being harmed by it. On an occasion at Eastern Michigan University, a professor felt she had been “defamed, had her reputation besmirched, had been sexually harassed and verbally abused” (Mahler) after seeing the things her students had posted about her during one of her course sessions. She was so distraught that she wanted to hire a lawyer. Although students may not be held responsible, nor are they given repercussions for their words, they are still hurting people emotionally, whether they care to realize it or not.
Students have enough to worry about during college, why add another thing to their plate? What student wants to have to worry about if they are being yaked about on Yik Yak, or worse what student wants to see a yak about themselves on the app and have to go through their day facing people who know them and have most likely read the yak? No college student, or even college professor for that matter, should have to worry about being verbally abused on an app. The cons of Yik Yak outweigh the pros by a landslide. College students should think twice if the app will be beneficial to themselves or not.
Editorial this is written in response to: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/yik-yak-online-anonymity-good-college-students/
References
Junco, R. (2015, March 17). Yik Yak and Online Anonymity Are Good for College Students. Retrieved December 30, 2015.
Logue, J. (2015, October 22). Who Should Prevent Social Media Harassment? Retrieved December 30, 2015.
Mahler, J. (2015, March 8). Who Spewed That Abuse? Anonymous Yik Yak App Isn’t Telling. Retrieved December 30, 2015.
Rios, E. (2015, November 11). Everything you need to know about Yik Yak, the social app at the center of Missouri’s racist threats. Retrieved December 30, 2015.