Yik Yak Brings Toxic Online Culture to MSU

Yik Yak was an app popular in 2014-2015 with predominantly college students but faded into obscurity in 2017 after the app shut down due to controversies surrounding racism and cyber-bullying. However, it has made a resurgence in recent years. Today, the MSU Yik Yak is feral.

It's similar to an anonymous Twitter where the humor is grounded in the shared experience of living in a certain location. It can be a fun place to bond over location-based problems, yet it can also cause serious problems. Anonymous messenger apps are by no means a new platform but on Yik Yak, the anonymous audacity is unprecedented. 

Many social media platforms exist to fill niches in online communities. Snapchat is for photo sharing and Facebook is for misinformation campaigns. This begs the question: what niche does Yik Yak bring to the social media space? From my experience with the platform over the last year, Yik Yak survives by giving college students a place to sexualize and glorify the stereotypical college life. 

As predominantly younger people find themselves on this platform, the culture present online is increasingly more likely to leak into the culture offline. 

The first issue is that any anonymous platform will inherently create a more volatile and toxic community. Knowing that you will never be held accountable for your words bolsters already present personality flaws in many people. Most sites rely on two ways to filter out toxicity. One method is moderators, which are people with power to remove messages and issue user bans. There is also the community that has the power to dictate content by using up or down votes. Opinions bordering on the toxic range likely will not be given traction and anything worse can be influenced by the moderators. 

However, Yik Yak has no moderators. It is region-locked to a 5-mile radius around your phone so there is only a small user base influencing the content. The anonymous content on a college campus according to my experience on Yik Yak consists of being horny and alcoholism.

Any platform that is used to promote unhealthy drinking habits and sexualization should not exist. 

Social media is awful enough from a mental health perspective but now there is the added disadvantage that college can not go beyond these shallow ideas. 

How many times do I have to read “10 upvotes and I’ll pull the fire alarm in North” to be convinced that this community has nothing to bring to the table either in humor or meaningful content? 

Before my freshman year, I found the MSU Reddit where I read about dorm life and general move-in advice. There was even a pinned comment by a moderator that facilitated older students talking to incoming freshmen. 

When I arrived on campus, I thought maybe Yik Yak would be interesting and also provide knowledge about daily college life. Instead I found a pit of deep despair and shallowness that only  brought more uncertainties. Is this what people are like here? Is this how my college experience has to look? 

The audience for the platform is freshman but I can't think of a more harmful introduction for the diversity of experiences at MSU than telling someone how they should experience their life. In the post-Covid landscape, it is inevitable that more people have flocked to messaging-based platforms. 

However, it would be a travesty for the incoming classes to be influenced by this small, hypersexual and offensive subset of the community. To me, Yik Yak is a bunch of people bragging that they need help.