YikYak is a social media app with an enormous potential for both good and bad. It’s the watering hole by which the various campus herds converge for sustenance in the form of information. For those who are unfamiliar, YikYak allows users to post on a forum for students at their school anonymously. Often, this simply leads to campuswide jokes and discussions of pertinent campus topics, but sometimes the guise of anonymity simply leads to a blind feedback loop of lies that causes more harm than good. Ultimately, regardless of the truthfulness of information spread, YikYak cultivates a culture of complaints that don’t often lead to any positive change in the student experience.
Again, YikYak can absolutely be a positive forum when it comes to getting student attention directed toward issues that matter. Sometimes, valid issues are discussed on YikYak and students are encouraged to take action and make a change in their situation. This can range from talking to a campus resource to emailing a professor about a concern. The app can be a source of information for students on campus affairs, as long as the information is vetted. Posts are deleted entirely once they hit -5 in Yakarma (the aggregate of upvotes subtracted by downvotes in the style of Reddit), which means there is some level of selective vetting that can occur since students have the power to delete misinformation. However, they have to be able to spot the lie and label it as misleading to do so.
The guise of anonymity more often than not leads to misinformation campaigns. People misunderstand how campus affairs work and end up spreading falsehoods about administrative actions or the actions of the student government on campus. Sometimes, people start rumors out of nothing but boredom. My freshman year, a bunch of frat brothers banded together to convince YikYak that one of their brothers had died. This did not happen and the brother was in fact alive. I’ve seen posts that I could verifiably say were about me or people I knew and were just not true. Anonymity emboldens students to say things without caring about potential consequences for people involved. However, YikYak is not truly anonymous and it’s important to know that the school can still figure out who posted things and you need your school email to enroll.
The biggest problem about YikYak is that people aren’t willing to transform any collective opinion on the app into collective action. There will be multiple posts complaining about something related to Student Government but there will never be any of those same users coming to talk to their Student Government representatives. They’ll complain about administrative action but they won’t talk to administrators when given the opportunity or refuse to testify in front of the Board of Trustees. It’s incredibly powerful to have a place where students can come together and form their opinions on really important issues, but this needs to transform into students taking action. It’s created a complaint culture where students will hit post on a YikYak about an issue and think that it’s a meaningful and final contribution to the cause. Student movements can start on YikYak but if they stay there, that’s where they will die.
