BY ANTHONY GOSS CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Leah Lockwood keyed into her room on the third floor of Falconio Hall at St. Bonaventure University. She rummaged through her backpack, mapping out a night of studying in her mind.
“Just saw Leah Lockwood climb through a townhouse window,” her roommate blurted out.
“What?” Lockwood, a freshman sports media major, responded with a puzzled look.
“Someone just posted this on Yik Yak,” her roommate said, showing Lockwood her phone.
Her cheeks flushed when she read the text on the screen. She reached for her own phone and frantically texted her friends about the post.
“You just never know who’s going to say what about you,” Lockwood said.
Yik Yak, a social media application originally launched in 2013, operates from Atlanta, Georgia. The app relaunched in August 2021 after a hiatus that began in 2017. The platform allows its users to connect anonymously with others within five miles. Users upvote or downvote posts based on their opinion of the content.
Some students discovered the benefits of an online community unique to Bonaventure, a rural Franciscan university in western New York.
“When the basketball season started the ticket problem was something a lot of people were talking about,” sophomore accounting major Joe Palisano said. Bonaventure students had struggled to access an internet link to claim tickets for basketball games. “It is interesting to be on social media and see things only about the area you live in,” Palisano said.
But other students and faculty said the app has presented a gateway for demeaning behavior rather than communal integration. Posts surfaced in December 2021 regarding students in the Higher Education Opportunity Program. The program helps students with financial and educational circumstances pursue higher-level education interests. The university has operated the program since 1981.
“In my experience [we are a] very targeted group. A Yik Yak comment was directly to us,” said sophomore marketing major Nikai Santiago. “People can make a fake account and go on the internet and say the most outrageous things about other people.”
Some students said they felt confused, not knowing how to defend themselves or their friends.
“What am I supposed to do?” junior psychology major Akim Hudson said. “I don’t know who I am talking to or what I am going to say.”
Michael Calabria, O.F.M., associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies, said he noticed the impacts of the posts among his students.
“I was truly saddened because I know it hurts people and it hurts my students,” Calabria said. “I have students of color who were so broken as a result of hearing that.”
To Calabria, the posts not only hurt his students but also contradicted the values of Bonaventure.
“Those kinds of comments betray what St. Bonaventure is about,” Calabria said. “Whenever a particular group is disparaged, that betrays the community we hope to create at St. Bonaventure.”
Mathew Goldsmith, assistant director for campus safety, noted the difficulty in preventing harmful interactions on any social media platform.
“There isn’t anything that we can do to prevent someone from posting something harmful,” Goldsmith said. “If you can, make your account private. This limits the ability for individuals to post and see what you post.”
Goldsmith has previous experience working with Yik Yak. He became a cybercrime specialist with the New York State Police in 2014, dealing regularly with Yik Yak and other social media.
But the university searched for a permanent solution to prevent similar issues in the future, unable to preemptively act on these posts. This led to the creation of the Yik Yak task force to combat any offensive material or posts targeting Bonaventure students on the app.
Members of the task force use a group chat to share posts they find on the app. These students then downvote the posts until they disappear. Any Yik Yak post disappears once it receives five downvotes.
“We see a lot of misogynistic comments, we see a lot of sexually explicit comments, we sometimes see racist comments,” said Meghan Hall, a senior journalism and marketing double major.
The task force works to prevent the spread of explicit material online, but very few of these issues escalate, according to Goldsmith.
“We have had less than five complaints regarding social media posts for the fall and spring semesters,” Goldsmith said. “I believe the Bonaventure community is a good and welcoming community.”
The task force began operating in January but has already provided a sense of relief for Bonaventure students.
“I care about my reputation. I don’t want to go around with people thinking something about me that I am not,” Lockwood said. “It makes me feel safer knowing that someone deletes completely untrue stuff being said about me.”
gossac20@bonaventure.edu
