The newest social media app, Yik Yak, has arrived in Oxford, or more precisely at Oxford High School. It was apparently unknown to most students before the school bell rang Tuesday morning, but by 3 p.m. virtually every student with a phone had downloaded it.
The Twitter-like app, designed for college students, allows anonymous posts which are only visible to those in roughly a five-mile radius. Then high school students found out about it. What works okay for college students doesn't work so well for high schoolers trapped in the same building together all day. The app has been a nightmare for school administrators around the nation, who say that it has been used for bullying.
Yik Yak's developers disabled the app at all Chicago schools earlier this month, and went on to apply a GPS block at all U.S. middle and high schools. Of course, Oxford High has only been in its current location a few months and it apparently isn't in the database. So Oxford students spent Tuesday anonymously spouting off about things or students they didn't like.
Yik Yak is essentially a digital version of the "burn book" from the movie "Mean Girls." Hopefully school officials will contact the app's developers and request to be included in the school-exclusion database.
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Below is the clip from the movie that shows the aftermath of a burn book gone viral.
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