Yik Yak has been flooding our smartphones with unfiltered crap. For those who are unaware, the app is designed very much like Twitter–except every post is anonymous and only reaches those within a 5-mile radius.
Two Furman University students designed the app, where it was meant for college campuses to post events, news and voice complaints from the student body. However, Yik Yak grew into something more malicious and dangerous.
The app swept into many states and even reached the hands of middle and high-school students. Many of the students started to abuse the anonymity provided with Yik Yak and began posting bomb threats.
In L.A., two Southern California high schools were put on lockdown after bomb threats via Yik Yak (turned out to be a hoax after no sign of explosives).
In Massachusetts, a high school in Marblehead was evacuated twice in one day on March 4 after threats were posted on the app.
In a recent interview with CNN and in an effort to combat the underage “Yik-Yaking,” one of the co-founders, Brooks Buffington said:
“One of the things we were planning to do is to essentially geo-sense every high school and middle school in America, so if they try to open the app in their school, it will say something like ‘no, no no, looks like you are trying to open the app on a high school or middle school and this is only for college kids,’ and it will disable it and the app won’t work.That will completely eliminate the problem we have been seeing, so we geo-sensed the entire city of Chicago until we get this fix up. We are working on getting third-party help to get the fix in place as soon as possible.”
It is still unclear whether or not Yik Yak will have a moderator, but what is clear is that many students will continue their shameless bashing and cruel rants of other students on it.