Yik Yak Social Media App and Virtual Bulletin Board Used to Bully High School Students
The new social media app Yik Yak, which acts a "virtual bulletin board," has been growing in popularity among college students, but for high schools, it often times is used to bully and issue threats to other students.
Fox News reported that Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, two recent college graduates from Atlanta, created the app that was launched in December to work like an anonymous version of Twitter within a small, confined community of wherever the user happens to be.
"With Yik Yak, we allow anyone to have that power, that audience, and you're not limited by who's following who," Droll told Fox. "And this app isn't a one-to-one messenger. Anyone within 1.5 miles can see it. We equate it to a virtual bulletin board."
Yik Yak lets users anonymously vote on or reply to any postings. Unlike Twitter, which only allows 140 characters, "Yaks" can be as long as 200 characters.
Droll told Fox that the app is geared toward college students because the company's members do not believe teenagers in high school or below are mature enough to use the app responsibly.
"We're proactively trying to keep high schoolers off the app," Droll said. "It's being used very well at colleges. We think psychologically high schoolers aren't ready to use our app."
The app restricts access to about 130,000 primary and secondary schools in the U.S. but several parents and school officials have reported that some teenage students are using the app at their school to bully, harass and physically threaten others.
In Connecticut, Fairfield Public Schools issued a message to the student body's parents alerting them that Yik Yak was "creating opportunities for mean-spirited, bullying behavior."
"Upon researching this we have learned that Yik Yak has been causing issues at middle schools, high school and colleges around the country," the message read. "The issues range from bullying behavior, racial harassment, sexual harassment, to bomb threats and threats of physical violence."
A Yik Yak spokeswoman told Fox that, after the company received complaints from the Fairfield school district, it blocked access to the app at three middle schools and two high schools within in Fairfield.
Fox reported that on two separate occasions, one teen in California and two in Alabama had recently used to app to post terrorist threats to nearby schools as well as their own.
Buffington insisted that social media in general shares the same issues of bullying and threats, and he pointed out that, on college campuses, Yik Yak has been used to help others, including one student at Vanderbilt University who raised money for a classmate that was diagnosed with cancer.
"It allowed him to easily connect with his whole campus," Buffington said. "Within one day, more than 1,100 people showed up to see if they were a blood match. Awesome things like that happen all the time with our app on college campuses."