On speech, equality and Yik Yak

I learned two things about Yik Yak this past summer: first, that it existed and, second, that my home Yak feed was awful. It was a bunch of high schoolers complaining about high school problems, and a bunch of college kids complaining about how the Yak scene at [insert college here] was infinitely better than the one in the 727. When I finally returned to Duke's campus this spring, I was blown away by how quickly my Yak feed would refresh. I saw hundreds of jokes, thousands of yaks and my yakarma started taking off. I've been waiting for a while to see what the next Duke scandal would be and it's been right here all along: A Yik Yak race war.

Generally, the Yik-Yak culture is students making quick and easy jokes about campus life to try to increase their yakarma. But, its anonymous nature and use of an online forum has allowed people to post extremely derogatory things that they would never say in person and for the Yak scene to be a pretty inhospitable place.

I'm all for the freedom of speech, and I think that people should be able to share whatever opinion they want even if it goes against the majority consensus. The New York Times recently did a piece on how college campuses have increasingly become safe spaces, sensitive spaces and how sharing opinions that are different from the norm is discouraged. Concerning social issues especially, progressives tend to be particularly vocal and dominate the conversation whilst conservatives tend to argue that they don't feel like their opinions are given proper respect.

However, the current arguments were prompted by a group of drunken, white, male students singing a traditional SAE song directed at black students walking by that includes extremely derogatory comments such as "There will never be a n***** in SAE; You can hang from a tree but you'll never sign with me." That kind of harassment, intimidation and targeted attack has no place on Duke's campus. It is unclear whether the white individuals were students at Duke University but that is irrelevant—the continuation of hateful comments on Yik-Yak shows that many on this campus still hold on to the kind of prejudices that could lead someone to doing what those students did.

Yik Yak makes it difficult to respond to these opinions because it blurs the lines and makes it difficult to distinguish trolls from legitimate opinions. The people who are sharing legitimate concerns tend to phrase their questions about things like privilege and what constitutes racial prejudices moderately, while the trolls tend to use incredibly obnoxious, emboldened language. Regrettably, the latter is often used as examples of why the former shouldn't share their opinions. It's a cycle of the extremists making the moderates unable to use Yik Yak as a forum to ask questions and share their opinions.

The question remains: why is this form of social media being used for discussions about race anyway? People have become emboldened by Yik-Yak's anonymous nature, and they are saying things that they would never publicly say at a discussion about race in person.

An article in the Chronicle written earlier affirmed that Duke would make no move to censoring the social media app when Larry Moneta said in February that "the best way to deal with [offensive material] is to bring forward more information." This is exactly what's been happening. So the only way that our Yak feeds will be free is when trolls stop flaming.

I think we need to decide whether or not Yik Yak is the appropriate place for serious conversation. If this kind of insensitive flaming continues, then Yik Yak might go the way of CollegiateACB.