You Can Yak but You Can't Hide

Xue, Minhui; Ballard, Cameron; Liu, Kelvin; Nemelka, Carson L.; Wu, Yanqiu; Ross, Keith W.; Qian, Haifeng

doi:10.1145/2987443.2987449

Cited by 17 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…As Bachmann, Knecht, and Wittel (2017) remind us, 'there is hardly ever total anonymity, neither temporally, nor socially, nor technically' (249). Even without legal process, a certain level of hacker de-anonymisation of yaks was demonstrated as possible (for example Xue et al (2016) and Moskowitz (2014)) ( Figure 2).…”

Section: Yik Yak and Hatementioning

confidence: 99%

The social value of anonymity on campus: a study of the decline of Yik Yak

Bayne

Connelly

Grover

et al. 2019

Learning, Media and Technology

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This paper considers the social value of anonymity in online university student communities, through the presentation of research which tracked the final year of life of the social media application Yik Yak. Yik Yak was an anonymous, geosocial mobile application launched in 2013 which, at its peak in 2014, was used by around two million students in the US and UK. The research we report here is significant as a mixed method study tracing the final year of the life of this app in a large UK university between 2016 and 2017. The paper uses computational and ethnographic methods to understand what might be at stake in the loss of anonymity within university student communities in a datafied society. Countering the most common argument made against online anonymityits association with hate speech and victimisationthe paper draws on recent conceptual work on the social value of anonymity to argue that anonymity online in this context had significant value for the communities that use it. This study of a now-lost social network constitutes a valuable portrait by which we might better understand our current predicament in relation to anonymity, its perceived value and its growing impossibility.

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Section: Yik Yak and Hatementioning

confidence: 99%