Intro: LION reached out to a student who had been targeted on Yik Yak to find out how they reacted to the negative comments. The student has chosen to remain anonymous.

I made some mistakes this summer and the Yaks just started popping up. I don’t live close enough to LT to get the Yaks, so I first found out that people were talking about me on the app when my friends started texting me, sending me screenshots. At first I was confused—why would people want to say that? I was upset about it but I couldn’t do anything because I didn’t know who had posted it.

Many people make similar mistakes that I made over the summer, but I am unlucky in that my actions, and I myself, have been attacked on Yik Yak. It came to a point where I would look at the app, and every single Yak would be about me. It’s sad that people have to make comments like that anonymously. If you really have a problem with me, come up to my face and say it. That way, even if people’s judgments made me upset or emotional, at least I would know the context and who said all the mean stuff.

I’ve realized words really do hurt. They are definitely powerful enough to cause serious depression, even if in my case I wasn’t driven to such a severe reaction. I never felt like online bullying was a problem at LT until all of this went down. Since Yik Yak is anonymous, people find it easier to say mean things. They never have to go public because their stuff doesn’t have their name on it. Now cyberbullying has definitely become a problem at LT.

Sometimes I can tell who made the posts, but the people still act as if everything is still the same when I’m face-to-face with them. But sometimes I don’t know and the people who yakked could be anyone. It could be someone from one of my classes, it could be a friend, or it could be someone that I don’t even know. Whenever I do find out about someone who made posts, I’m honestly shocked.

Recently I found out that a friend of a friend posted some of the awful yaks about me and it made me so mad. I never imagined that she would do that. I didn’t even really know her, and she didn’t really know me. She just saw all the Yaks about me and reposted them because she was trying to be funny and get “ups.”

I want the people making these comments to know that even if it makes you feel good when you get “ups,” you have to think about how it would feel if people were writing things about you. It’s as simple as treating other people the way you want to be treated.

People treat me differently now after all of the attention from the yaks. Literally everything I do ends up being talked about. Some of my friends have come up to me and told me that I need to “be aware of what I do.” Other friends are trying not to hang out with me as much because of the stupid mistakes I made.

My parents saw one of the yaks at the beginning of the summer. My dad was upset that people would post things like that. My mom told me that that there will always be idiots out there who do things like posting on Yik Yak and that my actions were to blame.

I haven’t used the Speak Up Line or talked to the school about it because it was all in the summer and the problem hasn’t carried into the school year as much. People still bring it up occasionally, but I just ignore it because I think it will blow past. At least, eventually.