Daily Deacon

School Administrators Do Look at Yik Yak

According to Dr. Penny Rue, the Vice President for Student Life at Wake Forest, administrators do in fact look at the social media smartphone application Yik Yak.

“I do read it when my attention is called to it, usually for bad reasons,” Rue explained. “Because I find it so often heinous, I choose not to patronize it.”

Rue said that Provost Kersh also frequently looks at Yik Yak. The administration so strongly opposes Yik Yak that they have taken steps in the past couple of years to remove the app from our campus, albeit with very little success, according to Rue.

“Because Yik Yak is accessed on a smartphone, removing it from campus servers would not be very practical,” Rue said. “We’ve spoken out about it not being worthy of our community, certainly. We’ve also looked at putting pressure on investors to stop investing in Yik Yak, but that doesn’t seem very practical either.”

Rue also explained that the administration has contacted Yik Yak in the past couple years about helping them locate IP addresses for posts that are threatening to others, but Yik Yak has not agreed to help.

Yik Yak was founded in 2013 by Furman University graduates Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, with the purpose of allowing college-aged people (and older) to anonymously post and view discussion threads within a five mile radius. A user has the ability to upvote or downvote a post. A post with five downvotes is instantly deleted. Yik Yak is on over 2,000 college campuses worldwide, according to its websites.

Many Wake Forest students have mixed feelings about the social media app. Caroline Magee, a senior, is one of them.

“I think it’s funny, but sometimes people take it too far,” Magee said. “I think it’s useful as a source of comedy or even as a place to test ideas, but too often people use it as a platform to post vulgar or hurtful things.”

Yik Yak posts range in a variety of different of topics. Some are meant to be informative, such as the many posts referencing the campus event Shag in the Mag today. Another post included a picture of Ray-Ban sunglasses, as well as a caption explaining that the glasses had been turned over to campus shuttle driver. However, some posts are more malicious and vulgar in intent:

“Assert your dominance by telling your current fling that you hook up with other people to let her know you’re a savage,” one post said.

Yik Yak became especially controversial at Wake Forest in October of 2014 when Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternity on campus, was accused by an African-American RA of having a racist-themed party. Many threatening posts were made toward the RA, some of which were racially charged. Some posts even threatened his life.

“Yeah, that was a really messy situation,” said junior Mark Bernstein on the matter. “That was a perfect example of when Yik Yak was taken way too far.”

In instances when Yik Yak posts are seen as threatening, campus police can get involved, according to Sergeant Lesia Finney of the Wake Forest Police Department.

“Incidences of troubling or threatening behavior on Yik Yak or other social media have been escalated when necessary. Yik Yak has procedures in place for handling such instances with law enforcement agencies.”

Rue noted that Yik Yak grabbed her attention because of another similar social media outlet that was prevalent on campus from 2007 to 2009 called JuicyCampus. Like Yik Yak, JuicyCampus was a forum where people could anonymously post, but with even less safeguards against cyberybullying and vulgarity than Yik Yak.

In 2009, JuicyCampus “died a natural death,” as Rue puts it. However, she is unsure if Yik Yak will suffer the same fate because it is so easily accessible as a smartphone application. JuicyCampus existed in the pre-app age, when a mainframe computer was needed to access it.