In Marshall’s 2025 Student Government Association election, the candidates for student body president and vice president ran unopposed, but they came close to having an unlikely opponent: me.
On Wednesday, April 2, a friend of mine sent me a screenshot from an app called YikYak. If you’re like me and don’t know much about this app, the creators of YikYak describe it as a “radically private network connecting you with the people around you.” In other words, Marshall students (or students at any college, for that matter) can anonymously post to a feed solely made up of their peers.
Now, this screenshot was from the comment section of a post asking if anyone else was running for student body president. One commenter said, “The girl from The Parthenon,” and when someone asked who, they replied, “Baylee!”
At first, I thought this was comical. Anyone who knows me knows that I hardly feel comfortable having my face on the page of the newspaper I work for, let alone having my face represent the university’s student body.
But then, the screenshots kept coming. People were talking about me, saying they’d vote for me, and correctly spelling my first and last name. And I didn’t know who any of them were.
Although the election’s now over and the results have been announced (spoiler: I didn’t actually win), I’m still left with unanswered questions.
Who started this rumor? Why did they start it? How do these people know me? Do they even know me?
Of course, this rumor was not harmful to me or anyone else, and it was a little fun to entertain the idea of me being student body president. However, the whole situation got me thinking about how platforms like YikYak are breeding grounds for misinformation, and the rumors spread on them are likely harming students like me every day.
YikYak was originally introduced in 2013 and, “After a wave of initial popularity, faced sustained public criticism for enabling cyberbullying along with racism, sexism and other toxic discourses,” according to a study by Dannah Dennis, program officer at Johns Hopkins University.
The app was shut down in 2017, only to resurface in 2023 after being purchased by Sidechat, a platform similar to YikYak. In her article, Dennis said the owners of YikYak and Sidechat “have attempted to remain anonymous.”
To say the owners of these apps lead by example would be an understatement, as their platforms boast the beauty of connection through anonymity, even though study after study has shown people are more likely to behave in morally questionable ways when they can hide behind a screen, especially knowing they may never face consequences.
Cyberbullying, which includes but is not limited to harassment, stalking or outing personal, private information, does not magically disappear once we graduate high school.
According to a study by the American Counseling Association, up to 22% of college students reported being bullied online, and 38% of participants knew someone who had been bullied online.
Although this was not the case for me, apps like YikYak provide the perfect space for it to be the case for someone else. It’s one thing when you think about my unanswered questions in the context of my situation; it’s a very sinister other when you think about them in any other context.
Misinformation is scary. Misinformation plus anonymity is far scarier.
Baylee Parsons can be contacted at [email protected].
