I recently learned about an up and coming app called "After School- Funny Anonymous School News For Confessions And Compliments,” that is causing problems in our community. This app checks your credentials with Facebook to approve your school and then connects you to a feed of other students-- all of whom post anonymously. As a member of my school’s leadership class I instantly knew that I wanted to take a stand against it.

Bullying is already an enormous problem for us as high school students, and adding anonymous apps like these into the mix only makes things worse. With the shield of anonymity, users have zero accountability for their posts, and can openly spread rumors, call classmates hurtful names, send threats, or even tell someone to kill themselves -- and all of these things are happening.

But how do you fight with a force of invisible, faceless people? I looked at the app with a friend to get an idea of what all was being said, and it was completely and utterly disgusting. There were accusations of teachers sleeping with students, gay bashing and hate mongering, cyber bullying, threats of physical bullying, sexual harassment, and promotion of suicide.

The app itself is doing nothing to stop these types of posts or suspend users who abuse the service in this way -- in fact, they are relying on this sort of horrible anonymous posting to make a profit, without any regard for the very real consequences that students like us can face when this type of bullying and rumor-spreading runs rampant.

As apps can be deleted and then re-downloaded it seems pointless and futile for our school to ban the app, so I had the idea to create a petition asking Apple or Ambient to remove this tasteless app from the App Store, and help keep our community safe and open for all students. I'm trying to reach 100,000 signatures, and would greatly appreciate if you would sign, and share the word to bring together all those people who feel the same, and create a force to be reckoned with.

Thank you for your time, and your support.