Why yack with your friends when you can Yik Yak with strangers? Yik Yak, casually dubbed “anonymous twitter,” is a social media app originally geared towards college campuses. Created by 2013 college graduates, Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, the app locates its users’ whereabouts and from that data, streams anonymous commentary posted within a few mile-radius. Although the app was launched in November 2013, Yik Yak has just recently taken the Mizzou campus by storm.
The old saying goes, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all,” but after downloading this increasingly notorious application, it seems as though a more befitting phrase would be, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, write it all and anonymously publish it on Yik Yak.” The sad truth is, with the phone screen as a shield, there is little incentive for people to be nice and unfortunately, Mizzou’s own students have been a testament to that.
For every witty comment there is about the recent, tragic absence of smoothies at Baja or the repulsiveness of the communal bathrooms, there seems to be 100 incredibly offensive remarks to bury those diamonds in the rough.
Even more troubling, threats of school shootings are becoming less few and far between. Several individuals across the country have been arrested for making terroristic statements via the app. Although nothing of this magnitude has occurred on Mizzou’s Yik Yak, it does unveil the inherent flaws of anonymous social media sites at the most extreme level. One would think the short-lived reign of other social media sites like Ask.fm and Formspring would be enough of an indicator that anonymous outlets aimed towards teenagers normally fail miserably.
Although some credit must be given to the creators for making a slight effort to minimize the amount of harassment on the app. The men outlined a list of rules, such as “you do not bully or specifically target other yakkers,” and implemented features such as the ability to report or “downvote” yaks. However, I have yet to see any of these safety measures actually being monitored. Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist for the Fox News Medical A-Team, goes so far as to say Yik Yak is the “most dangerous app [he] has ever seen.”
Yik Yak, or as I prefer to call it, the watering hole for Mizzou’s racists, sexists, and pessimists, is overwhelmingly not worth the download.