On Thursday, SUNY Canton shut down its campus in response to a mass shooting threat posed on Yik Yak, a social media app. Yik Yak, a relatively new innovation in the sphere of faceless Internet conversation, allows users to post supposedly anonymous status updates that can be seen in a limited geographical area. An app user in Canton thus “anonymously” warned students to avoid campus if they valued their lives and, as a result, an entire university was evacuated in a matter of hours.
This sort of online threat is not an isolated incident. In the ongoing Gamergate controversy, online users tweeted death and rape threats to female video game designers and reporters, forcing them to flee their homes in terror. This bears striking similarities to the events at Canton: individuals hiding behind usernames threaten violence to others who are unable to make a well-informed judgement about its seriousness.
That inability to assess is dangerous. Unfortunately, not all threats made on the Internet are empty, but there are too many to respond to all of them with the appropriate force. That sort of uncertainty leads to incidents like that in Santa Barbara where, before the shooter killed seven people, he posted a YouTube video where he promised to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde slut.”
Some Internet users exploit their perceived anonymity to spread fear and terror. With apps like Yik Yak growing in popularity, it’s easier than ever to make threats of mass violence. In the past, students wrote bomb threats on bathroom walls. In those cases, over the course of several hours, the threat might draw the attention of a small group of students or a school administrator. Now, the bathroom wall is instantly accessible to everyone with a smartphone and a reliable wireless connection.
Threats of mass violence are nothing new. The difference now is that perpetrators feel safe and untraceable behind their digital screens. And while Internet users may feel insulated from the consequences of their actions, these apps aren’t truly anonymous, even if they appear to be. Consider Whisper, another popular anonymous posting app. The app claimed not to track user data, but a recent investigation by The Guardian discovered that it did, and that it shares user data with law enforcement when necessary. Sharing user data with law enforcement is a common practice among social media websites to track criminals and hold them accountable for their actions.
The Internet is a public space more immediate and accessible than any other. Through the Yik Yak incidents at colleges like Penn State and SUNY Canton, we have witnessed the ability of seemingly innocuous apps providing anonymity to its users to cause disorder and panic. While personal privacy is certainly important and desirable, the costs of absolute anonymity far outweigh the benefits. The most seedy of Internet transactions occur through anonymous channels: Distribution of child pornography, illegal drug smuggling and human trafficking, to name a few. To keep the Internet safe, users and their actions must remain traceable; to keep us safe, we must accept a limited degree of privacy in our online sphere.