In spite of anonymity, accountability must be maintained in Yik Yak exchanges

When Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington created Yik Yak,they did so with the intention of voicing the opinions of the disenfranchised and the unrepresented.Yik Yak's anonymity, theoretically, allows for a more unfettered kind of free speech in which fear of being ostracized need not be considered when speaking up. But with anonymity comes a lack of accountability, as the same protection from judgment can facilitate harassment, hate speech and generally uncritical commentary as easily as thoughtful humor and provocative ideas.

Much of the banter of Tufts’ Yik Yak feed is made up of innocuous meditations on conditions or scenarios common to many members of the Tufts community; EC 5, the dining halls and the social scene are a few examples of frequent yak subjects. Some popular posts are terse one-liners, while others share long stories. In some cases, the comfort afforded by anonymity even allows spontaneous and contingent support systems to materialize, functioning within the same premises as services like Ears for Peers. However, while Yik Yak may make such positive interactions possible, it does not guarantee the exclusion of harmful posts as well.

For some, anonymity can be an empowering shield through which they can educate peers in ways that would not be comfortable or possible for them in person, rendering the community-based approach to monitoring discourse effective as a way of fostering a fair space for sharing ideas. While the responsibility for this kind of scrutiny is concentrated with a small number of curators and editors in anonymous outlets for expression like Tufts Confessions or the Public Journal, it is fully democratized in spaces like Yik Yak. As a result, uncritical or offensive yaks in the Tufts feed will often fall subject to heavy criticism.

However, policing Yik Yak can also result in a doubling-down of the ugliest aspects of the status quo. David A. Banks, a scholar of technology and society, writes that "[n]orms, whether they are desirable or undesirable, are rewarded by [Yik Yak's] voting mechanism." Yik Yak's distribution of accountability always leaves open the possibility for a challenging idea to be censored while a popular idea gets amplified, regardless of which one has more potential to meaningfully stimulate the community.

As an editorial in the Middlebury Campus argued compellingly last October, it is the responsibility of all users of a platform to make it function in the fairest way possible. While inventors like Droll and Buffington may earnestly intend to design platforms with particular goals in mind -- in this case, the goal to create an objectively meritocratic forum for free expression -- such spaces can never operate as planned without a concerted effort from those who occupy it.