Tracking the Yak: An empirical study of Yik Yak
Name
yikyak.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.03 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d647f7938b1a56555c37a9a5dbb7ba99
Author(s)
Saveski, Martin
Chou, Sophie Beiying
Roy, Deb K
Date Issued
March 2016
Journal
Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Citation
Saveski, Martin et al. "Tracking the Yak: An Empirical Study of Yik Yak." International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, North America (2016).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
To investigate the effects of anonymity on user behavior, we conduct an empirical study of the new and controversial social app, Yik Yak. First, we examine how users use the platform, analyzing patterns in posting, popularity of yaks, and vocabulary. As a comparison, we look at posting patterns on Twitter, which has similar limitations on lengths of posts, but is public and global rather than anonymous and local. Upon a sample of 2.9M posts (1.9M yaks and 1M geotagged tweets) from 20 locations across the USA, we find that interactions on Yik Yak are specific to its location limitations and reflect the schedules of its targeted demographic, college students. Second, we test two hypotheses related to anonymity and communication: (i) whether vulgarity usage is more likely to be acceptable, and (ii) whether unique topics emerge in conversations on Yik Yak. We find that posts on Yik Yak are only slightly more likely to contain vulgarities, and we do not find any significant bias in topic distributions on Yik Yak versus on Twitter; however, differences in vocabulary and most discriminative words used suggest the need for further analysis.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM16/paper/view/13156
