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This is what the students at Ted Cruz's announcement were saying on Yik Yak

Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox's Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.

Announcing his presidential bid at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, was a smart move for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on a variety of dimensions. Picking a school founded by Jerry Falwell let him showcase his evangelical bona fides to religious primary voters, and picking a university that sued to block Obamacare's employer mandate and birth control coverage requirements demonstrates the seriousness of his opposition to the law.

But there was another big advantage to picking Liberty: it guaranteed him an audience. Cruz spoke before one of Liberty's weekly convocations, at which attendance is mandatory, meaning he was assured a critical mass of students would attend. Then again, some of those students inevitably got bored, and this being 2015, the result was a stream of critical comments on the social networking app Yik Yak, which is popular on college campuses and lets users share anonymous posts to people nearby:

Open the tweets and click the images to see more YikYak posts. "Imagine no mandatory convos" may be the most brutal of the bunch.

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