The Pros And Cons Of Yik Yak

Yik Yak was founded in November of 2013 by two college graduates of Furman University. This app allows users to make anonymous posts for every within a five-mile radius to see. When you post a Yak the users get the option to up-vote, down-vote, and comment on any post within those five miles. A Yak can get as many up-votes as it can get, but if it gets negative five votes, the Yak gets deleted from the feed. Yik Yak is an app used by many to ridicule and make fun of people, but what can you do to fix the situation when you have no idea who is saying it. The anonymous app Yik Yak was created for users to speak freely; however, since there is no accountability, the app poses imminent threats to communities through safety threats, sexual harassment, …show more content…
The officials at Yik Yak can do everything in their will to ban the app, but someone will always find a way to dodge the system. Not only is this a Yik Yak problem, “…it’s 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” (Mahler 5). Being that this app is so new, there are some glitches that the Yik Yak workers do miss. An example of this is when college campuses ban the app from their wireless networks. Since college campuses have been denied geo-fences, blocking the app from the wireless networks is the furthest one can go to ban the app. If the students decide to use their own cellular data, they have full range to use the app however they please. The threat to students will never go away, but the founders are trying their best to end such problems. At the end of the day, one can just hope that the students will make the right decisions with the app. It is very important that our students understand that if one is caught misusing the app in a way that will threaten anyone’s life, law enforcement has the appropriate resources needed to track an individual