![]() In that way, the community regulated the environment.īut Saveski said that such a system isn’t foolproof. ![]() Users could upvote or downvote any post, and those with a negative 5 score would get removed, while posts with many upvotes would be given more prominence. Yik Yak was founded by Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll while they were students at Furman University in South Carolina, and they did make efforts to keep toxic and hateful comments off the app. In that way, the veil of anonymity made Yik Yak a “safe space” in some cases, the researcher added. ![]() The final small percentage included confessionals and requests for advice on taboo subjects-in some cases by folks who said they were suicidal-that in some cases helped the user connect with resources in a helpful way. Of the rest of the posts on the app, a small portion included racist and homophobic comments-as he put it: “all the negative stuff that you don’t want there that’s the stuff that you worry about.” You have to have clear community standards and say what is tolerated and what’s not tolerated.” -Martin Saveski, Stanford University postdoctoral researcherĪbout 95 percent of the posts the researchers found on Yik Yak were what he calls “mundane chatter,” like talking about traffic or drinking. “But that’s not to say that that small amount of abusive content is to be ignored.” "One of the most important learning points from Yik Yak is that it’s not enough to have this community filtering. “To my surprise, we didn’t find that much negative stuff,” he said in an interview with EdSurge. ![]() Martin Saveski, now a postdoc at Stanford University working on computational social science, co-wrote a paper back in 2016 called Traking the Yak: An Empirical Study of Yik Yak, which set out to see just how much hateful and abusive comments resided on the app. Proponents of anonymous apps say that in a world where saying the wrong thing on Twitter can lead to serious consequences, having a safe place for college students to test ideas is more important than ever.įor the latest entrants in the college-focused social media world, the biggest question boils down this: Can anonymous discussion apps possibly be implemented in a productive way on a campus? Lessons from the Pastīy now the situation at Yik Yak is old enough that you can read academic studies of how discussions on the anonymous app played out. Capitol that some argue was incited by tweets from then-President Trump and his supporters. The broader social media environment is different now than even a few years ago, though, as the nation struggles with a national reckoning about the role of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, especially after the recent violent riot at the U.S. Before that, Juic圜ampus, an anonymous website with college-by-college forums, sparked a consumer-fraud investigation and complaints about hosting hateful and malicious comments before it shut down in 2009 for lack of revenue. The incidents appear similar to previous controversies around Yik Yak, an anonymous app founded by college students in 2014 that attracted more than $73 million in funding, and some lawsuits, before it shut down in 2017 because of a failed business model. Meanwhile at Dartmouth College, an anonymous app designed for college students called Librex caused controversy during student-government elections in October, after users of the app posted comments about a candidate that some found racist. Anonymous discussion apps are growing on some campuses-along with calls that they are leading to racist and toxic comments that harm students.Ī student at Hillsdale College wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper there in November calling on her classmates to boycott an anonymous discussion app called Jodel, which she says is spreading sexism and hatred.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |