Lillian Spiller
Two platforms come to mind when we think of community. Namely, Twitter and YikYak.
The two are similar and alike in countless ways: both encourage posting to like minded audiences, but focus on different ways to do so. Twitter relies on the use of hashtags, like #BlackTwitter, while YikYak enforces location-based communities tied to school campuses. Do the two yield different results in the community they build?
Tripodi notes that while YikYak is an anonymous social media, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people will post what they “really” think. This stems from YikYak’s unique way of content moderation: the court of public opinion. If a post receives enough downvotes, it is removed from the feed. While valuable in regulating hate speech that pops up on any social platform, it can be misused to silence unpopular, but otherwise harmless opinions. Tripodi argues that moderation in this way excludes those that can’t integrate with the popular opinion both on the site and in the physical environment that comprises the community. She says that this is like a “double marginalization”: being out of place in a physical community, and out of place in the social networks it uses. Anonymous posting loses any power it has in giving a platform to opinions people wouldn’t usually connect themselves with, as the platform is removed altogether if the opinion is unpopular. This doesn’t bar anyone from posting again, but it exerts a social
pressure to only post content that aligns with the norm. It’s difficult to back up the author’s claims due to the temporary and anonymous nature of the platform outside of interviews conducted with its users.
Williams, while focusing on Twitter, decided to investigate a community of black students in university. While this makes for an easy parallel to be drawn between this and Tripodi’s article, it limits the scope of the study. Regardless of this distinction, this article is a solid investigation of a community on Twitter. Williams mainly points to the “context collapse” (or the merging of on- and off-line living) as a primary factor displayed in this community. She argues this through the weekly discussions of episodes of Scandal, a political thriller TV show. The act of discussing the show the day it airs on Twitter merges the off-line action of watching a show with the on-line action of discussing the show, with some users partaking in “livetweeting” (the act of posting about a piece of media while still actively watching it). She argues that this creates a sort of kinship in the black community of Twitter as a metaphorical concept in the same way that geo-fencing in YikYak enforces a physical community. Williams also discusses how the use of code-switching, or the act of changing the way someone speaks and acts toward certain people, encourages the exclusivity of the community to black users. This excludes the
non-marginalized from the community.
These two examples show that there isn’t much of a difference between anonymous and non-anonymous social media, at least when it concerns university communities. The communities formed here serve two different purposes: one further marginalizes the already excluded, and the other creates a space for the marginalized to have a sense of community/togetherness. The fact that YikYak is anonymous doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor in what makes it exclusionary to marginalized people, but rather the user-led moderation it
utilizes. At predominantly white institutions, the status quo is one that often excludes people of color, and this is made apparent in how user-led moderation on YikYak reflects these values and further excludes them. “Black Twitter”, on the other hand, is a community that inversely does not prioritize white voices. Instead of being enforced by user moderation, one’s identity is the key to belonging, as white people generally don’t have knowledge in code switching and other facets of the Black Twitter community.