TL;DR – Black students at Emory University kindly request that the anonymous messaging app, Yik Yak be banned on campus, due to incidents of students anonymously making racist comments
Man, who would’ve guessed that if people were given the shroud of anonymity on the internet, they might just say some critical things! Who would’ve also guessed that in spite of the idealistic world full of equality for all, that there still exists, racism? Who knew??
Not that I’m condoning the behavior in question here, but honestly these students must be new, to like, modern society. I’m also not saying that they should sit around and take it, when racists are capitalizing on the veil of anonymity and saying some racist garbage, but the harsh reality is that shit is most certainly nothing new.
Yes, it’s definitely frightening that people still have thoughts like the things they’re anonymously voicing, but at the same time, lots of it is nothing that lots of people haven’t thought before, whether or not they’ll admit it. For those who don’t want to click the link, or delve deeper into the story yourselves, basically a lot of Yik Yak users are saying some racially critical things, but they’re also not going too far off the deep end; lots of commentary about perceived hypocrisy, as well as concerns over #BlackLivesMatter. From what I’ve seen, nobody’s going for the low-hanging fruit, and there’s still an air of thought behind the things being said, even though that at the root of it, there still exists racism.
Going after Yik Yak themselves isn’t going to solve anything, because if there’s one thing that young, college-age students hate more than anything these days, its attempts at suppression of the first amendment. Even if there is success at getting a geofence put around Emory campus from using Yik Yak, people will simply find an alternative to it, so they can continue on making veiled remarks about black people, if not worse, once they realize that an attempt to censor has come into play.
It is unfortunate that people are taking advantage of an anonymous sounding board, but putting a spotlight onto this whole situation isn’t going to help anything at all. If anything, now more people have now heard of Yik Yak, what they’re capable of getting away with doing on Yik Yak, and it’s just going to usher in a new wave of trolls and troll-like behavior.
If black activists didn’t turn this into “a black thing,” then Yik Yak would’ve remained as the app that the psycho Japanese-American girl used to falsify a massacre threat to the very same campus, and ain’t nobody would’ve wanted to copycat that, because like in her case, you can and very likely will, get caught for it.
