Yik Yak is premised on a great concept.  The app allows anyone to make a post that will be seen by users in the same physical area. The posts are completely anonymous. The idea is to foster meaningful conversation by ensuring anonymity and targeting posts to users around you.

Because the app is completely anonymous and unmoderated, it has become a platform for hate speech, bullying, and even threats of violence.  The creator of the app has, so far, been silent about these problems.

The right to free speech is an important part of a healthy society, and anything that stifles it should be treated with a good deal of skepticism.  However, a system that allows completely unmoderated, anonymous speech fosters little other than negativity, obscenity, and hatred.

Yik Yak's own policies prohibit this type of speech.  However, the app does nothing to ensure that their own terms and conditions are observed.  Though there is a mechanism to report offensive content, posts reported as offensive sometimes are not removed or are restored after being removed, even if they are clearly in violation of the app's terms of use.

Posts made on this platform have led to major disprutions and panic after threats of violence were made. Here are a few examples:

Teen arrested after school shooting threats on Yik Yak

School put on lockdown after pipe bomb threat on Yik Yak

Lockdown at another school after violent threat on Yik Yak

Certainly, these types of threats could be made in other ways, and Yik Yak has the potential to foster positive conversation and harmless fun.  But balanced against the potential for abuse, the postives that Yik Yak actually produces are outweighed by the negatives.  As evidence, let's look at the posts featured on the homepage of Yik Yak's website. These posts are meant to be representative of the type of post found on Yik Yak. This is supposed to be the best the app has to offer. As of today, the features posts are the following:

"Breakfast, the only meal where it is socially acceptable to eat by yourself."

"I tried to facetime campus police last night."

"Attendence is not expected to be high today given the rain and hangovers."

"Sundays at the dining hall...where you distinguish the religious from the hungover"

"To whoever folds the clothes in the Green laundry room for random people.  You're going to heaven my friend."

"S/O to the girl currently puking the Cook Out parking lot."

These are the posts that the company has chosen to highlight as a representation of what their app is about.  Among these, just one says something positive.  The rest are negative or funny, but all are tame compared to the types of comments posted on Yik Yak every day. Most of the posts in my area are not fit to post here.

This app is distributed on Apple's App Store and the Google Play store. Both companies should remove the apps from their stores because they violate their policies on apps that are likely to expose users to violence.  Clearly, the app has already exposed many to threats of violence, and there are surely many more examples beyond the dramatic incidents mentioned in this petition.  Atlanta Capital is a financial backer of the app, and should stop funding it until its creators can demonstrate they are making a good faith effort to enforce their own terms and conditions.

Free speech is important.  It would be difficult to overstate how important it is to a free society.  However, when you, as a private institution (the Yik Yak creators), provide a forum for free speech, you should make some effort to ensure that non-protected types of speech (threats and hate-speech) are moderated.  When you distribute the platform (Google and Apple), you should take care not to expose vulnerable users to it.  Even though the app is rated 17+, Apple and Google make little effort to enforce any meaningful restrictions on it, and they are surely aware that many teenage users download apps with this rating in defiance of the policy. Atlanta Capital is backing a platform that they know to be infested with hate speech, bullying, and threats of violence, and that does nothing to advance meaningful conversation.

The principle of free speech comes with the expecation that while governments must not interefere, citizens must moderate their own speech.  The success of the principle is contigent upon such moderation.  If meaningful speech is overpowered by mindless drivel or mean-spirited attacks, the value of free speech is lost.  We, as citizens, ask these companies to remove this app from their distribution networks, and to suspend their support of this project until its creators can demonstrate a commitment to protecting their users.