#9 The Writing On The Wall

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Gimlet

Society & Culture, Documentary, Technology

4.7 • 29.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2015

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yik Yak is a an app that allows users to communicate anonymously with anyone within a 10-mile radius. At Colgate University in upstate New York, the anonymity brought out a particularly vicious strain of racism that shook the school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Colgate University is a tiny private liberal arts school.
0:02.9	Just 3,000 students.
0:04.5	Way up in the mountains in Hamilton, New York.
0:06.7	It's the most beautiful college campus in America,
0:09.1	according to the Princeton Review,
0:10.6	located in the 11th-friendliest town in America,
0:13.0	according to Forbes.
0:14.7	But not according to Melissa Melendez,
0:17.3	who's a student at Colgate.
0:18.9	Like, one of the first things that I saw about me was, um,
0:22.0	like, it was like, bash that bitch's head in.
0:24.4	Melissa saw that comment, and much worse,
0:27.0	on an anonymous social media app called Yik-Yak.
0:29.8	Yik-Yak lets you see posts or yaks, as they're called,
0:33.2	from users within a 10 mile radius.
0:35.2	So it's no surprise that it's really popular
0:37.0	at college campuses.
0:38.4	People can post anonymously on Yik-Yak
0:40.2	about lame frat parties, or hot arrays, or boring classes.
0:44.2	But at Colgate last semester, the site also became a screen
0:47.4	onto which the student body's ugliest,
0:49.3	most bigoted, and violent thoughts were projected
	...

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