YikYak: Bullying Back in Style
How do you feel about the food at the Caf? Your Wednesday morning professor? This sports team or that one? A stranger you passed in the hallways? Lately, students at Centenary have been posting many of their thoughts on YikYak, an anonymous social media app that allows college students to post within their college communities. As with any anonymous platform, users rarely post their kinder opinions. Instead, Centenary’s YikYak feed is filled with aggression, hatred, and bullying.
I downloaded YikYak a few months ago, right around when it was beginning to gain traction on campus. I’m nosy; I wanted to know what was going on. I ended up deleting the app three days later after a racist post about the Woman’s Basketball team gained popularity. This was after I’d seen multiple posts calling women by half a dozen pejoratives and another handful of posts filled with homophobia. I’d already had to look up the word “foid:” a slang combination of female and android, used as a way to either dehumanize women or queer people, depending on the user.
I’m a senior here at Centenary. I’m a woman. I’m openly queer. Seeing so many of my peers post and then agree with the posts shook my confidence. In the past four years, I’ve managed to make a circle that has always made me feel safe and accepted. I’ve begun to see my friends as family. I had forgotten just how hateful people can be to people they don’t know.
To write this article, I had to download it again, and I had to read the posts. Football is a constant topic on the feed: people critiquing it, asking for it to be defunded, talking about specific players, demanding that the head coach be fired. No sport is safe. My own sport, STUNT, is new and relatively unknown. Still, my teammates and I have been called fat, ugly, cheaters, and, my favorite comment, 280 lbs. lesb*s. It seems that nearly every sport, organization, group, and major has been criticized.
Many students are referred to specifically, often using initials as student identification is banned under YikYak’s community guardrails. Also against the rules is bullying, harassment, racism, bigotry, sexual assault, drugs, alcohol, harmful activity, suicide, self-harm, nudity, sexual content, spam, violence, gore, misinformation, posts discussing minors, and trolling. I have seen all of these posts on YikYak. Very few of them are taken down or reported.
It’s entirely possible that many of the worst posts are made by the same person. It is also entirely possible that a significant number of students at Centenary spend their free time bullying their peers. Either way, the app’s contents have caused me to rethink my interactions with strangers. I second guess the way people look at me. I dissect their words. Maybe I’m the only one, or maybe I’m not.
Anonymous platforms like YiKYak are hotspots for bullying and cruelties said behind screens. Online harassment is enough of a problem without creating a platform where anything can be said without repercussions. Centenary’s campus is small. While you might not know someone, it is hard to feel detached from their troubles. How disconnected can you be from a few hundred people who live at the same address as you? How often will you sit in a classroom with someone you’ve laughed at? How many times will you eat next to someone you’ve disrespected. When you like a YikYak post full of hate, how will that change how you treat people?
I do not presume to think that we will be kind to people all the time, even if that is the goal. I do, however, think that having access to the type of platform YikYak provides is dangerous for our students. I think it is too easy to be mean behind a screen. I’m tired of worrying who the next target will be—if it will be me. For one, I cannot wait to delete the app off my phone. I hope, as most trends do, this one dies quickly and fully.