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despite what you may think you are not anonymous on Yik yak I am Bridget Carey this is your C net update the so called anonymous social media app Yik yak II is in the news again surrounded by controversy over people using it to do awful things Yik yak is an app where you can keep your identity a secret from other users and you can see everything written by people near your general location you can think of it as a local message board where you don't know the names of who is posting on Tuesday students at the University of Missouri noticed hateful racist threats of violence against black students and faculty posted on Yik yak warning people to not go to campus if you've been following the news you know that this adds to the racial tensions on campus where students and faculty are protesting how the school is dealing with racism well guess what the university police arrested the suspect who posted those threats to yek yek yek yek works with the local authorities to track down people who do such things and violate the rules what you do online is not anonymous just because an app advertises as such and this is an ongoing problem with yay gak with morons who think they won't be found there were four mass shooting threats made on Yik yak at four different universities in the past 30 days and you can find multiple reports of similar threats and hateful posts at school campuses going back to last year Yik yak is also just a breeding ground for cyber bullying and mean gossip when no one's names are published and every time I open it up I'm looking at the worst of the Internet I couldn't even show you the feed from my own phone's app because it was too nasty I would have to just blur out the whole screen it's just garbage well let's move on to another social media app making news and I do mean making news Facebook is diving deeper into the news business with an app called notify the notify app sends you news alerts from a variety of different publications you pick the topics you're interested in like tech or sports or you can get specialized reports from just one publication such as the daily morning forecast from The Weather Channel or sports score reports from your favorite team and if you tap into the notification it'll take you to the full article or video it's right now only four iphone users in the US the benefit is that you can get lots of news alerts without having to download the app for each of these separate news outlets Facebook getting into news shouldn't surprise you every social media app these days wants to be a news hub just look at snapchat discover Twitter moments and apples news app but Facebook's biggest challenge will be to get people to care to download it Facebook has many other apps that have struggled like paper riff moments slingshot and rooms to name a few that's it for this tech news update and there's more escena comm from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey