A month after its debut, a 17-year-old at Brandon High School in Ortonville, Mich., threatened an attack in a series of After School posts, including one that read, “Id rather take my AR 15 to school and practice on my classmates than to the gun range,” said his attorney, Deanna Kelley. Students say that most comments are benign, and Callahan said problematic posts are a tiny sample of the millions of messages that appear on the app’s boards.īut there have been complaints about cyberbullying and anonymous threats on the app since shortly after it first appeared in November 2014. He sees it has having “therapeutic” potential. “There’s a need for people to be able to communicate in a place where they wouldn’t be judged, where they could speak freely,” said Michael Callahan, 32, who created the app with Levy. After School allows them to be themselves without worrying so much about what other people will think, he said. Levy said the product creates a much-needed alternative to Facebook and Instagram, where teens have grown up carefully curating digital identities that might not reflect their true struggles and anxieties. (Rod Sanford /For The Washington Post)Ĭory Levy, 24, one of the app’s founders, said After School gives teens a chance to “express themselves without worrying about any backlash or any repercussions.” He said the app is a new way for teens to ask difficult, uncomfortable questions anonymously and to more directly address issues such as depression, how to come out as gay to one’s parents or how to navigate the daily challenges of teen life. Mya had her personal cell phone number posted on the app and was forced to change it. Mya Bianchi, 15, shows the After School app on a cellphone in Ionia, Mich. Even then, parents could be stopped by an algorithm that aims to block people from posing as high school students. Parents and others who want to access the app would have to lie to do so, saying on Facebook that they attend the high school. The real-life people behind those digital missives are usually known on After School, users are anonymous, and some say that has enabled and even encouraged cruelty and threatening behavior.Īfter School limits its audience to teens by requiring users to verify that they attend high school through their Facebook pages and by creating restricted message boards for each high school campus. “I don’t feel like there should be something that excludes parents.”Ĭyberbullying has been around nearly as long as the Internet, and teens have taken conflicts and taunts to social media on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as via text messages. “They’re underage children,” Bunting said. Her mother, Carrie Bunting, said Mya was “freaked out” to be getting messages from unknown numbers. This video describes safety features the app's creators added following criticism that it allowed students to post bullying messages as well as threats. "After School" is a social media app that allows teens to post anonymously on message boards closed to adults and provides a space to ask difficult questions without revealing their identities. After receiving harassing messages, she had to change her number. Mya said a user posted her phone number along with instructions to contact her for photos, a message that was punctuated by a winking smiley face and icons of a camera and a bikini. “At first it was people saying nice things and complimenting others, and then it turned into bullying,” said Mya Bianchi, a 15-year-old who attends Ionia High School in central Michigan. Similar to Yik Yak - an open app that has become popular on college campuses - After School allows teens to post comments and images on message boards associated with individual high school campuses but carries nothing identifying the students who post there. Because it is designed to be accessible only to teenagers, many parents and administrators have not known anything about it.Įnvisioned as a safe space for high schoolers to discuss sensitive issues without having to reveal their names, After School has in some cases become a vehicle for bullying, crude observations and alleged criminal activity, all under a cloak of secrecy. The After School app has exploded in popularity this school year and is now on more than 22,300 high school campuses, according to its creators. Millions of teenagers in high schools nationwide are using a smartphone app to anonymously share their deepest anxieties, secret crushes, vulgar assessments of their classmates and even violent threats, all without adults being able to look in.
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