The Student News Site of Florida Gulf Coast University

Eagle Media

Eagle Media

Eagle Media

Stop Yakin’, Just say no to the anonymous app

Yik Yak is apparently the newest thing on our college campus and needs to be gone just as quickly as your dream of getting straight A’s.
Do you remember FormSpring? That awful anonymous-0question website that we used in high school to tell people that they were ugly?
Meet its ugly stepsister.
Unlike Formsping, Yik Yak is designed for college campuses and is GPS-enabled. Each anonymous post has a 200-character word limit.
I decided to download Yik Yak and see what all the fuss was about, and I was amazed that these are the topics that our university’s students are concerned about.
The statements went from talking about the hot chick in someone’s math class, to how much someone hated their professor, to complaining about their tummy troubles from SoVi.
A lot of the comments were strictly gossip, and I quickly realized that this website seemed more like a diary than social media.
Most of the posts on the app were sharing secrets about the authors, and many times secrets about others — advancing the rumor mill on the Florida Gulf Coast  campus.
Although I thoroughly enjoy the highly comedic yaks such as “When I die I want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time,” or, “If Pluto can make a comeback, so can my GPA,” these seem few and far between.
For the most part, the yaks seem to just be “slut-shaming,” Greek gossip and about trips to the little yakkers room.
I’m not saying that we need to bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and sing “Kumbaya,” but this idea that constantly oversharing because you know that anonymity is an integral aspect of the website seems a bit aggressive.
Yik Yak has become a venue to write whatever terrible thing you want, have it broadcast to the world and then never have to own up to it.
I am a big advocate for having a soapbox — I write for a newspaper.
I believe that the First Amendment is one of the most important laws in the United States, and it makes America the great country that it is. But I’m pretty sure that James Madison didn’t quite expect the soapbox being an anonymous cellphone app.

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