Founders of Yik Yak say they are looking for a way to better the app by preventing threatening comments and racial slurs. Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington say they have a basic filter for words like rape on their app already, but some yaks still get posted. They hope to partner with a natural language processing expert to filter in the context of a yak. This would be done to better stop the yaks that do make it into a post. The two founders explained these plans last night at a discussion at the Tate Student Center.
The app currently uses a pop-up when it detects threatening language. The founders say the pop-up essentially says, “Hey, are you sure you want to post this? Yik Yak and law enforcement take this very seriously.”
They said since this, the number of threats have gone down to almost nothing.
