Is Yik Yak safe? Yik Yak App Review for Parents
Overview
Recommended age: 18 years
If you’re looking for an app that lets your child experience all the most dangerous things you can think of, then Yik Yak is the app for you.Yik Yak is a perfect storm of bullying, online predation, and inappropriate content that can cause problems if your child is exposed to it.
Here’s how it works:Yik Yak is an anonymous sharing app where users can post short public messages (such as tweets), comment on other people’s posts, and send direct messages with other users. Additionally, Yik Yak only shows you users within a 5-mile radius of you. But remember – it’s anonymous. This means that the need to maintain a reputation no longer exists. So you can imagine what users might do in this unfiltered, consequence-free online experience.
This article will go into more detail about this: the dangers your children may face if they are allowed to use Yik Yak. Keep reading to learn more!
Harmful content 😲
Where to start. Well, let’s start with cyberbullying. This is probably the biggest concern parents have about Yik Yak. The best way to understand Yik Yak is like a graffiti message on a school bathroom wall – except when it’s online, it can’t be hidden and more people are guaranteed to see it.
Not to mention the recent addition of direct messaging apps.DM opens the door to all sorts of misbehavior (including predatory behavior, which we’ll get to later). Not only can other users bully your child in front of everyone, but they can also send messages directly to your child without any “witnesses”. Of course, these messages remain anonymous. Best of all, the messages disappear after 24 hours. Sound familiar? Yes, Yik Yak takes a page out of Snapchat’s book. This means that tackling cyberbullying on Yik Yak is more difficult than ever.
In addition to the direct bullying that Yik Yak may be subjected to, kids are at risk of being exposed to hateful and violent content. When there are no names attached to posts, suddenly there’s nothing stopping some users from using Yik Yak as a place to spread racist and sexist content without repercussions.Yik Yak has even been made famous in a number of lawsuits over the past few years for some particularly heinous incidents of sexual and violent content. That’s enough to keep adults away from the app, not to mention children who may have inadvertently stumbled upon it on the internet.
Predation 🚨.
Early versions of Yik Yak offered only public posts with no direct messaging. In this case, there was still a risk of predation as strangers could easily comment on your child’s posts and exchange messages. But now with the direct messaging feature, the likelihood of predation doubles.
In short, Yik Yak messages are anonymous, location-based, and disappear after 24 hours. See the red flags? We hope all parents reading this article see the red flags. Because Yik Yak is almost too attractive to any would-be predator looking for an easy and discreet way to connect with their kids.
Positive Value 💙.
There’s not much of a strong argument for positive value here. While Yik Yak’s socialization feature sounds fun, it’s not worth the hassle that comes with it. There are plenty of other ways for kids to socialize – one of which is offline! But if you’re looking for something online, we’d recommend the Messenger Kids app. This app allows young kids to safely send messages to close friends and family. It’s not a public posting platform, but it can be used as an alternative to online socializing if needed.
Parental control ✅
There are no parental controls, but it’s worth noting that Yik Yak has implemented “community guardrails” to limit some inappropriate behavior. Here are the types of messages that Yik Yak has made prohibited for the app:
Identifying people and children
Bullying
Suicide and self-harm
Paranoia
Violence and threats
Pornographic content
Misinformation
While this may seem promising, Yik Yak enforces these Guardrails by relying on users to report issues; specifically, if a post receives “no votes,” the Yik Yak team will review it to determine if it should be removed. If a post receives five or more negative votes, it will be deleted immediately without review. The problem with this system is that it doesn’t completely stop users from seeing inappropriate content. If kids happen to see the content before reviewing it or before it receives the proper number of negative votes to have it removed, they’re likely to encounter it.
Finally, the App Store has rated Yik Yak at 17+. However, there’s no age verification when you download the app – in fact, it doesn’t even ask your age at all. This means that there’s basically nothing stopping your child from downloading the app to their phone.