Yik Yak app highlights racial tensions on college campuses

By Joshua Qualls

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As recent protests, death threats and terrorist attacks have dominated headlines and attracted attention on social media across the country, many people are looking to the popular anonymous microblogging app Yik Yak for answers.

Some UK students used the platform to deliver a mix of racial slurs and messages of hope last week when University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe and UM-Columbia Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin resigned following a series of protests by their own students.

Yik Yak set up shop on mobile app marketplaces in November 2013, and it has since expanded to more than 2,000 university campuses across the country. The anonymous bulletin board became the 9th most downloaded mobile app in the U.S. within six months of launching, and concerns about its potential for cyber bullying began to grow.

Co-founders Tyler Droll and Stephen “Brooks” Buffington created and developed the app while they were students at Furman University in Greenville, S.C. Thinking it would be a great way to break social barriers and connect people within their communities, the duo set out to “make the world feel small again.”

“The absence of a profile on Yik Yak levels the social playing field so that content is judged on the quality of content, not by who said it,” Droll said in a blog post.

Yik Yak spokeswoman Olivia Boger added that it could be a powerful support tool for those who need it.

“We’ve seen a lot of awesome uses for supporting students whose families are going through a divorce, or they’re struggling through depression,” Boger said.

Although the company has often expressed in the media that the app’s intended purpose is entirely altruistic, much of the actual content varies because of users’ anonymity.

“It’s mostly just banal observations,” said Jeff Rice, a writing rhetoric and digital studies professor who previously taught at the University of Missouri for four years. “Sometimes people are depressed, sometimes people are talking about love interests … but then of course you have a lot of racism, and anti-Semitism, and homophobia.

“You have to ask, ‘Well, is that Yik Yak or is that just some kind of manifestation of people in general?’ because those things also happen on Facebook (and) Twitter.”

Those who open the app are only able to communicate with people within a 1.5-mile radius because of geofencing technology. Geofences are virtual walls that use GPS to allow or prevent people from getting on a network based on their location.

Yik Yak was originally designed for college students, but teenagers also had unrestricted access to it at first. The social media platform endured a wave of criticism after a series of high profile cyber bullying and death threat cases, and it contracted a company called Maponics to put up geofences around middle schools and high schools in early 2014.

Though universities are able to block access to Yik Yak on their Wi-Fi networks, they are unable to prevent students from logging on from their mobile service. Disabling the service completely would conflict with the First Amendment, but some schools have symbolically blocked the service and shown their disapproval by forcing students to use their own data.

Last year UK’s Black Student Union organized a “die-in” following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, who were both black and killed by white police officers. The university’s Yik Yak feed was quickly filled with racist remarks as the “die-in” took place.

UK President Eli Capilouto condemned the remarks on Yik Yak and other social media outlets in a campus-wide email, insisting there is no room for hostility at UK.

“Such language is indicative of narrow mindedness and mean spirit; and what I have read sickens me,” Capilouto said in the email. “It is not who we are or wish to be.”

Forestry freshman Viktor Halmos heard about Yik Yak through friends and saw advertisements for it when he arrived at the beginning of the semester. He tries to stay away from the news content on the app, but he was on it as the University of Missouri developments unfolded.

“(There was) a lot of unneeded opinion,” he said. “Some people clearly had done their research, some hadn’t. Some just posted whatever came to their minds, but … it was mostly negative.”

Rice was at the University of Missouri when police arrested two white students for dropping cotton balls in front of the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center in 2010. The event stirred the university’s administration to unify the student body with an initiative called “One Mizzou.”

Protests broke out earlier this year after several related, racially charged incidents transpired. Rice said he did not think it had anything to do with Wolfe being racist, but the situation gradually became worse because of his failure to respond.

“People walk around all day long with offensive thoughts in their heads,” Rice said. “(Banning the app) is not going to change their beliefs.”

The Campus Attitude Toward Safety survey, released Aug. 31, reported that about 13 percent of the student body has experienced bullying on social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and Yik Yak.

Yik Yak declined to share usage statistics as part of its policy.