The YikYak app arose recently as a way for people to post messages anonymously according to their locations. Users could log on and post anything they wanted for anyone in a certain location to read without them worrying about who knew what they said. The app is less than a year old, but it has expanded to hundreds of high school and college campuses in the past year.
While YikYak's localized chat boards are certainly a unique venture, the app has also become a platform for a lot of bullying, sexual harassment and even fake bomb threats. This bullying has led some colleges to seek out means to place a ban on the app. According to the New York Times, some colleges are doing their best to limit the app's on-campus accessibility and to punish those who use it.
YikYak's creators report that they never expected their app to grow as large as it did or that it would be used as a platform for cyberbullying and bomb threats. The app was designed so that communities would self-regulate themselves with up votes and down votes, kind of like how Reddit and Imgur manage their content. However, the increasing presence of bullying despite this self-regulating feature has led the app's owners to incorporate a number of features in the past year to help fight these bullying problems, including placing a ban on the app in certain areas, adding pop-ups that warn people about the implication of their phrases when certain words are typed and even releasing the IP of certain posters when a threat appears to be particularly dangerous.
However, some don't feel that this is enough. Stanford psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude told the NYT that this cyberbullying is "a problem with the Internet culture in general, but when you add this hyper-local dimension to it, it takes on a more disturbing dimension.....You don't know where the aggression is coming from, but you know it's very close to you."
While many schools are trying to enable geo fences, which would stop people from using Yik-Yak in a certain area, they are proving to be less effective than expected. Fifty professors from Colgate University started flooding their local YikYak board with positive comments in order to fight against the harassment.
