Ella Kitchens, Editor-in-Chief

One thing has been clear from the start: Our university wants students to talk to each other.

During orientation week, all of us were required to attend a participatory debate. President Adam Weinberg’s welcome advice to the class of 2028 included the idea that we should be “curious about everyone and everything.” And numerous organizations on campus promote free speech and discussion, like Bridge Denison and the debate club’s Donuts & Discourse.

Of course, there are also conversations happening outside of classrooms and clubs. Since Denison is entirely residential, we’re surrounded by people we know 24/7. And at a school of 2,500 students, we share the same classes, dining halls, parking, and classmates.

But what happens when conversations and debates are occurring online? And what happens when every participant can be entirely anonymous, their name unattached to what they’re saying. What happens when those conversations get ugly, when accusations are made, when people are identified and targeted, even if it’s just with joking intent?

YikYak is an anonymous platform that allows students to connect to others at their school, giving students the ability to write posts and comments about whatever they want. You can upvote and downvote posts, and a post that has too many downvotes is taken down. You can also report posts for a variety of reasons, from being hateful to identifying a student.

YikYak has its uses. I remember when I got it during freshman year out of curiosity, I laughed at jokes and references that no one outside of our school would understand. Students wanting to push back against Denison’s administration mocked decisions like creating First Year Quad and closing Curtis Dining Hall on the weekends. Useful information was spread too, an inside scoop on classes and professors or deadlines for study abroad and housing.

I started to see jokes and references to specific people. I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t really care. I’m sure I hit upvote on some of them, thinking they were funny. But before long, I started to notice something more deeply wrong.

During the DCGA presidential election last spring, I first heard about this platform being abused. Someone would make a post accusing either presidential candidate of, well, whatever they wanted to accuse them of, and it was obvious whose initials they were referring to. After all, there were only two candidates running for the position. Things were said that, personally, would affect my own mental health if I were one of the candidates, and beyond that, impact the reputation of the candidates and thus influence voters. The problem is that this is all anonymous. Who was hiding behind a screen saying things they never would say publicly about either candidate?

Of course, there is some level of anonymous criticism that you can argue would be constructive at a college like Denison. An example includes this very paper, The Denisonian. My friend sent me a screenshot of a post where someone was marking up our paper with annotations pointing out grammatical and spelling errors. Personally, I took this criticism into consideration as I made sure to edit the paper more closely after I heard people were talking about it.

You could also say that by signing up to run for Denison student government, that you open yourself up to more public criticism, that people deserve to know who they might be voting for. I think that point is valid, but isn’t valid enough that anonymous hateful posts should be permitted. My further point, though, is that a lot of people have also received this type of anonymous attention without wanting to be in the spotlight.

Look on YikYak any day and you’ll see a number of people being referred to by initials or emojis. This has led to people being targeted on the app; while most are forgotten in a day or so, others consist. These comments are often cruel toward women and how they look. I’ve seen comments saying people in one sorority look like horses and called another sorority ugly. I’ve seen more specific references to a girl based on her breasts.

Other posts are used to make accusations against people. This reminds me of the anonymous Tea App, that women can use to share information about men they have dated or encountered. I can see how it could potentially be beneficial to share the news that a man could be dangerous. But so many of the posts, rather than seriously trying to warn people about someone who might have committed sexual harassment, are instead just used to mock under the guise of “Well they may have hurt someone, so I don’t have any sympathy toward them.”

Other posts have gone even further and made fun of people for “embarrassing” things they’ve done, mocking students who speak too much in class or who post something “cringe” online. I have personally seen posts that, if they were said about me, would make me feel terrible about myself. I’ve also seen posts reported and taken down, just for them to be reposted with twice the frustration of the original poster asking “Why did this get taken down,” showing that whatever reporting system in place ultimately doesn’t really work.

Other colleges have faced these challenges as well. In 2023, a student at West Virginia University threatened to take their own life after misinformation was spread about them on YikYak. There were rumors on YikYak about another student at the University of Florida referring to a nude video that she later learned was taken without her consent. Maybe I sound like I’m exaggerating here about how bad these things can get, but I don’t think that this is healthy for students at our age to be subjected to this.

The First Amendment protects anonymous speech online from government punishment or regulation. However, that doesn’t mean that Denison necessarily has to support this platform in particular. Universities such as Grinnell College and the University of North Carolina have banned YikYak, meaning that the university bans the app on their wifi keeping it from loading while students are on the wifi. Obviously, there are ways for students to get around this, but it could be a potential solution for our school.

It isn’t healthy discourse when one voice is completely anonymous. Free speech is incredibly important on a college campus like ours. However, I don’t think that permitting rumors to run rampant on an anonymous platform is good for students’ mental health. People can say what they want to say on any social media platform with their name attached, but our university doesn’t owe students the right to use an anonymous platform on their wifi.

Ella Kitchens ‘28 is a journalism and global health major from Lexington, Kentucky.