Yik Yak, After Complaints From Schools, Suspends Its Service In Chicago 167
The Chicago Tribune reports that Yik Yak, a mobile app that can (among other things) be used for anonymous communications, has drawn complaints from several local schools, who are unhappy that students can use it to bully or pester others.
"'The problem, as you might imagine, is that the anonymity is empowering certain individuals to post comments about others that are hurtful, harassing and sometimes quite disturbing,' Joseph Ruggiero, head of the Upper School at Francis W. Parker School in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, wrote in an email to parents last week. ... In light of the controversy, Yik Yak's co-founder said the company was disabling the app in the Chicago area and will attempt to specifically prevent it from being used on high school or middle school grounds."
Re:Windy City is MURDER CAPITAL of the world (Score:5, Informative)
In terms of absolute numbers, yeah, Chicago is quite high. But for the third biggest city in the nation, that's not exactly stunning. It's a purely manufactured crisis, to sell news, to increase spending on law enforcement, to justify gun control.
Bullies (Score:3, Informative)
Francis Parker School in Chicago is where the 1% send their kids. So, there is a substantial number of entitled little turds who have learned from their parents that bullying is one of the perks of being rich and powerful.
It does not surprise me that this has happened at that school.
I have first-hand experience there and far poorer inner city schools, and there is behavior at FP that you would never see in the inner-city school.
Re:Bullies (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is, at the inner city school, the kids have next to nothing. It's gladiator school.
The kids at Francis Parker on the other hand, have every advantage. If you sit in the coffee shop across Clark Street facing the window at 7:30am, you will see the line of Bentleys, Aston Martins, etc, dropping off little Trevor for school. And those are the less wealthy families. You can tell the really wealthy families because the children are dropped off by a non-white driver, sitting alone in the front seat (and yes, I have seen little Driving Miss Daisy caps on the drivers). They don't give little Mitt a lunchbox, they give him a platinum visa so he can pop down the street at lunchtime and eat on proper tablecloths and terrorize the wait staff. The parents treat the faculty of Francis Parker a little worse than they treat the undocumented aliens they hire to do their lawn care and nannying.
Anyone who believes there are no social classes in the United States just needs to spend an hour at Francis Parker to learn the truth.