I am going to be discussing episode #46 of Reply-All (a link to the episode is at the end of this post). This show is produced by Gimlet Media; a podcasting network I highly recommend. Besides Reply-All their network hosts Start-Up, the Mystery Show and Surprisingly Awesome. These shows are all relatively popular I found out about most of them by browsing the top charts of iTunes.
Reply-All describes itself simply as a show about the internet. I would draw comparisons to This American Life and Radiolab. The show generally deals with personal interest stories that have some technological component.
Episode #46 deals with the app Yik-Yak, racism and a small college campus. The story centers around Melissa, a puerto rican student from the bronx who experiences a culture shock beginning her first year at Colgate University, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York Melissa was used to being a part of a racially diverse neighborhood. Colgate's student body was predominantly white.
Throughout her time at Colgate Melissa experienced racism subtle and overt from both students and facility. Melissa took it upon herself to organize her fellow classmates in order to bring attention to the discrimination they were facing. The group agreed upon a list of demands and staged a sit-in to raise awareness. This protest however triggered a backlash of hatred.
The anonymous chat service Yik-Yak became the primary method for students to voice racism. The messages not only featured hate speech but evolved to personal threats. The students who were active in the protests became extremely fearful and when the dean was made aware they were given the option to leave campus.
The school did what it could to identify the authors of the yaks even going so far as to attempt to get a grand jury subpoena to force Yik-Yak to disclose the personal information of their users. This was unsuccessful and Yik-Yak did not share this information.
I found the story to be interesting on a couple different levels. First the ongoing issue of how the internet and an anonymous forum tend to always bring out the worst in people. Secondly the issue of where free speech ends and where threats need to be taken seriously.
I personally feel that Yik-Yak should have turned over the names of the users who made violent threats. Due to the small nature of this campus the targeted students have to live and go to school knowing that that their enemies are among them. This creates such an atmosphere of fear. These threats caused damage, they drove certain students to leave, while the others who stayed would never walk on campus alone.
I think the reason that Yik-Yak didn't is because on the internet people and companies tend to have an almost knee-jerk response toward protecting users anonymity. I understand this and it makes sense when you consider the history of the internet, which embodied this freedom and anonymity from the beginning.
This story made me think about the internets love affair with anonymity. I question if it will continue as this generation grows up with social media. Privacy has in many ways lost its currency in some ways it isn't even something this generation desires. With this being said I think we might see this value placed on protecting a user's anonymity above all else fade. With this I think we will see anonymous message boards and apps become more and more marginalized.
So while it is in no way surprising that those who made these threats online were not brought to justice, the response from the teachers and student body was. At first the school blocked the app on school grounds. This failed though as students continued to access the app from their phones. Next teachers flooded the app with positive messages about their students and signed the posts with their name. It is really fascinating to me that instead of relying on the law and administrators to protect us from this kind of anonymous violent hate speech, people took it upon themselves to fight anonymity by unmasking themselves.
