Police cracked down on violent, racist threats made against students at the University of Missouri amid this week's turmoil. The unusual thing: The threats weren't notes, anonymous phone calls, or tweets, but rather were made anonymously on Yik Yak, a social media platform popular on college campuses.
The Missouri case is yet another example of new pressures colleges are under to tackle racism and sexual violence and harassment, and how difficult it can be when those acts take place online.
Here's what the accused student wrote at the University of Missouri: "I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see." "Some of you are alright. Don't go to campus tomorrow." "We’re waiting for you at the parking lots. We will kill you all."
Specific threats are, in some ways, the easiest to handle — they're traceable even when they're anonymous, and the app will turn over users' information in those cases. The bigger and more vexing problem with Yik Yak is the comments that aren't specific threats, but that are still clearly hostile or harassing. The app can be a glimpse into a campus's id. And what it finds is much harder to fix than making a few arrests.
Yik Yak is particularly popular on college campuses
Yik Yak is an anonymous social media app that allows you to post, and read and respond to, messages of up to 200 characters filtered by what's been said around you. Think of it as a mashup of Twitter (strict character count, general randomness), Reddit (users can upvote and downvote), Snapchat (messages, called Yaks, eventually disappear), and the anonymous gossip message board that reigned on campuses a few years ago. You can also see what people are saying in other places — including peeking into your alma mater.
Yik Yak isn't strictly for college students; there are no limits on who can sign up, as there were in the early days of Facebook. But the app, built by two college roommates and fraternity brothers in 2013, started on the campus of Furman University and expanded by specifically targeting college campuses. And since college students tend to be geographically clustered and have some general common interest to talk about, college campuses were a natural fit.
Most of what happens on Yik Yak is pretty banal: campus inside jokes and memes; tales of romantic misadventures; generic complaints about studying, stress, dining halls, and sleep. More than 1,600 colleges now use Yik Yak; Business Insider estimated in May that the app has about 3.6 million monthly users, the majority of them in college.
That pales in comparison with bigger social media apps, but Yik Yak has gotten an outsize amount of attention, in part due to how students use it. Caitlin Dewey at the Washington Post did the math and found the app is averaging about one violent threat every two weeks. Amid the everyday banality, people have used it to criticize, target, and threaten students of color, women, and, in some cases, individual students. And so a debate is raging about whether Yik Yak is bad enough for universities to ban it, a lifeline for students who are struggling and isolated, or something in between.
Some terrible things that have happened on Yik Yak
Yik Yak was tightly interwoven with the University of Missouri protests. Students were upset about racist messages on the app before the protest began; afterward, it became a platform for racists to threaten students' lives.
But the University of Missouri was far from the only place threatened on Yik Yak. It's been used for shooting threats at Fresno State, Charleston Southern University, the University of North Carolina, Michigan State, Penn State, Florida Atlantic University, Widener University, and Towson University; rape threats at Mary Washington University and Kenyon College; and racist messages at Clemson University and American University, among others.
It's also turned into a hub for more specific bullying. A team of three women professors teaching a course at Eastern Michigan University discovered that someone, presumably their students, was posting photos and making sexually explicit jokes behind their backs.
Yik Yak has been compared to anonymous gossip sites like JuicyCampus that were popular on campus a decade ago. But the geolocation makes the anonymous threats and comments more unsettling. While anonymous tweets could come from trolls anywhere, anyone threatening students or campuses on Yik Yak is already physically there.
Increasingly, students are getting arrested for these threats. At least four students in the past two weeks have been arrested for threatening violence on Yik Yak, according to reports from the Associated Press: a student at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who threatened black students at Mizzou, the student who made the shooting threat at Charleston Southern, a student at Northwest Missouri State who threatened racist violence at his university, and a former football player at Fresno State who threatened that campus.
Police can get users' details from Yik Yak with a search warrant, and in an "emergency" situation they sometimes don't even need that. Anonymous threats don't always stay anonymous.
Yik Yak has done more than other social media sites to acknowledge that harassment is a serious problem. It's allowed high schools to block the app entirely and prevented students from accessing it while on school grounds, although it's declined to do the same for colleges. Yik Yak has also said it would ban users for bullying.
This week, as the threats surfaced at Missouri, Brooks Buffington, one of the app's founders, wrote, "Open and honest conversation can be a great thing — but it’s up to each and every one of us to ensure that it remains constructive, too. Being a part of a herd means showing respect for one another, through our commonalities and our differences."
Why feminist groups want colleges to ban Yik Yak
But colleges are on shakier ground when the comments are just hostile, not specifically threatening. At the University of Mary Washington, the campus rugby team was suspended after a student surreptitiously recorded members singing a chant at an off-campus party about having sex with a dead prostitute and turned the recording over to the administration.
A student group called Feminists United on Campus became a scapegoat, and the pushback got worse after the group's president wrote an op-ed for the student paper saying the university — which is about 65 percent women — was not a "feminist friendly campus." (Jezebel has a good summary of the whole situation.)
Anonymous messages on Yik Yak called the club a hate group, made hostile and sexual jokes about them, and posted two messages that were interpreted as threats, both references to TV shows. The university urged students to report threats to campus police and gave the president of the feminist group a police escort at a meeting. But the group argued the college didn't do enough, and filed a Title IX complaint against the university and, later, against its president, after he sent a letter refuting their complaints.
Feminist groups nationally followed that up with a broader appeal to the Education Department to urge colleges to crack down on anonymous posts.
One way colleges could stem the tide of harassment, the groups suggested, was by banning Yik Yak and similar apps on campus wifi networks, or asking the company to set up a "geofence" so it couldn't be used on campus, as it's done in response to some requests from high schools. They also suggested that students who posted anonymous harassment be sought out and disciplined.
This poses a host of legal questions. While Yik Yak will turn over users' data when specific threats are made, it doesn't do so when the remarks are simply hostile. Anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment, and public colleges, as state actors, have to tread lightly on those issues.
On the other hand, colleges are required to investigate and deal with reports of racial and sexual harassment on campus. And while the vast majority of racist and sexist messages on Yik Yak aren't explicit threats, they'd certainly qualify as racial or sexual harassment if the posters yelled them out loud in a classroom or workplace — and the geotargeted nature of Yik Yak means that the people being harassed know the calls are coming from inside the house.
The real problem is people, and people are terrible
It would be wrong to think that Yik Yak is always a terrible cesspool. There are heartwarming stories about how students have used it to give support to peers who are depressed or confiding secrets or even considering suicide.
"Most yaks are boring on their face—it’s just strangers welcoming the weather or dreading final exams—but taken together, falling into the Yik Yak feed has the effect of opening an emotional connection with the people around you," Amanda Hess wrote in defense of the app at Slate in March.
Peering into random campuses several days this week, most of the posts were pretty banal, some were funny, and a few showed how anonymity actually can help forge closer connections among (presumably) strangers. This post from a California college was followed by a sort of Yik Yak therapy session, where a few people encouraged the original poster to talk about what was wrong and helped put his or her problems in perspective:
But anonymity means that people say things they might not say out loud, for better or worse. On campuses around the country Thursday, students were using Yik Yak to talk about the protests at the University of Missouri. And while the commentary wasn't always hateful or even hostile, it provided plenty of evidence for why campus atmosphere might leave black students feeling alienated.
Many campuses featured commentary of the "all lives matter" variety, with students who didn't understand why their black peers were pleading for what seemed like special treatment:
These posts — which weren't hostile or threatening but do suggest why black students on many campuses might feel their complaints are unheard or misunderstood — were far more numerous than outright hostility. And they suggest that even if threatening posts were dealt with, Yik Yak's anonymity would still make it a hub for things people didn't want to say out loud. The problem with Yik Yak isn't just threats and harassment; it's that it's made up of people, and anonymity doesn't always bring out their best.