Yik Yak, an app that allows you to send anonymous messages to a public feed, has grown increasingly popular at the College and other colleges across the country. It is anonymous by design — the only personal information required by the app is the user’s geolocation. With its promise of anonymity, it may at first seem like an attractive forum for cyberbullies — the people who attack others and write vitriolic comments on social media when they think nobody can identify them. A quick scroll through the comments of any Beyoncé music video on YouTube reveals hundreds of these rude remarks. Even columns on The Dartmouth’s website can garner comments that attack the author.
A March 8 New York Times article highlighted the dangers of Yik Yak — at Eastern Michigan University last fall, students had been using Yik Yak during class to target the professor with “dozens of posts, most demeaning, many using crude, sexually explicit language and imagery.” When the professor reached out to university officials to request disciplinary action, the university couldn’t do anything because they couldn’t determine who the students were. Such stories give the impression that Yik Yak has fallen into the trap of most other anonymous social platforms, becoming a space for people to freely insult others.
This image, however, is not always accurate. It may be true that Yik Yak enables cyberbullies to post crude and defaming remarks about others. To say that the rest of the population endorses such verbal abuse, though, does not give the rest of us enough credit. With its built-in system that removes negative comments, Yik Yak outsources the moderation of offensive messages to its users, who can vote posts up or down. When a post reaches a net score of fives downvotes from users — in other words, when the number of people indicating disagreement with a post exceeds those in agreement by five — it disappears from the app’s main feed. On campuses with hundreds of active Yik Yak users, it doesn’t seem difficult to bring a post down to minus five. The promise of anonymity has benefits, too — people who may be too afraid to call out rude people in public might be more willing to do so in private, without fear of retribution.
Browsing the College’s Yik Yak feed proves my point. Though there are occasional posts about campus celebrities and other persons of interest, most of them are not harmful, and those that usually meet pushback in subsequent replies. I have watched as malicious posts — especially when they attacked a specific individual — were quickly voted down and then removed. In a sense, the whole campus can work together to rebuke rude, insensitive posters and cyberbullies.
We should not forget about Yik Yak’s encouraging features. Strangers often come to the aid of a student who shares that they are having a bad day. Posts about loneliness and stress commonly inspire thoughtful and genuinely helpful replies and tend to get positive votes, demonstrating that other students may feel the same way. On a campus where many appear outwardly happy, this positive feedback may give the author, as well as the hundreds of other students who see it, a concrete sign that they’re not alone. For people who may not have a strong support system or who may not feel comfortable telling their friends, having the support of strangers who do not need to take the time out of their day to write thoughtful comments may greatly impact them in a positive way.
Unfortunately, unsettling incidents like the one in the New York Times article happen on every social network. It is well known that students sometimes bully their peers on Facebook and other networks, and users don’t even have a shield of anonymity in those cases. In an ideal world, cruel posts would be so socially unacceptable as to never occur. In reality, however, there will always be those who fail to uphold this ideal. Yik Yak and its anonymity are a double-edged sword. The built-in checks against posters who abuse the network to target individuals and spread hate ensure that Yik Yak’s desirable qualities prevail. The College’s feed contains many funny posts, some whiny ones, others sad — but very few truly abhorrent posts. That may be Yik Yak’s greatest strength — in a completely anonymous community that relies on its contributors to self-moderate, people end up doing their job remarkably well.
