Yik Yak: The Last Bastion of Free Speech on Campus

Whye Tamann ’28

Top Redditor 2024

Trinity College: a place where free speech is encouraged and celebrated. That is so long as it is pre-approved, doesn’t go against an agenda, and has been thoroughly checked to make sure it is rid of any microaggressions that may offend any one of the many demographics on campus. In this dark and dreary tunnel there is a light however, and it shines through from our phones in the form of a small bovidae icon —  a beacon of hope for those who wish to whine and complain at their leisure without the confidence of putting your name on it. 

YikYak serves as a safe space for our more bashful campus intellectuals to share their revolutionary ideas. In an era where words are watched carefully and held  as personal attacks, YikYak provides an environment where Emma and her posse of pretty preppy clones can voice how the door at AD was awful and how the music in PIKE was bad. Will they go back next weekend anyway? Surely. But this doesn’t matter —  the back breaking weight that they had on their shoulders to find something wrong in everything was relieved. Did poorly on a test? Surely it wasn’t because you didn’t study and stayed up drinking or on Tiktok. Instead, YikYak about how stupid your  professor is for assigning a short answer section. Watch as the comments flood in from others who equally didn’t prepare to make you feel better about yourself. These are only a few examples on how YikYak maintains a safe and reflective echo chamber for what can be considered true free speech. It gets rid of the judging people who may look at you differently for your pessimistic nature. Here, you can “speak” freely from a space of privilege about the mundane issues of your life. This space is sorely needed, because who makes time to listen to the Rich White Man nowadays?

Of course the detractors will try to claim that YikYak fosters an environment of toxicity. But if we are being honest, anonymity doesn’t create toxicity, but more simply reveals the deeply suppressed thoughts that students were too afraid to utter in their carefully curated, LinkedIn-ready lives, like “who up rn someone tryin to suck this meat”. If free speech is dying, then YikYak is the final, barbaric yawp into the void. And if that scream is just a picky eater complaining about the man at the Halal station, then so be it. That, my friends, is the price of liberty.