Senior citizens lagging behind developments in the Wide Wired World (e.g. me) need to know that Yik Yak is an “App”—not be confused with an “Ap.” An App is an application which allows the user to perform certain functions on his internet device. “Ap,” on the other hand, stands for “Aperture,” a function which opens a little hole in the time/space continuum, allowing the user to escape into GeekWorld, far from the “realities” that annoy and distract non-Geeks.

(By the way, I’m giving a quarter to anyone meeting me on the streets of Farmington who can say “wide wired world” 10 times in 10 seconds without stumbling.)

Two college grads, supposedly named Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, designed Yik Yak as a “local bulletin board” available to smartphone owners for anonymous short postings within a 10-mile radius. Yik Yak App downloaders are asked to check one of those “I agree to the Terms and Conditions” boxes. You have to check them, but you don’t really have to read them and few people do, but anyone who does will find this instruction: “By way of example, and not as a limitation, you will not directly or indirectly transmit any pornographic, obscene, offensive, threatening, harassing, libelous, hate-oriented, harmful, defamatory, racist, illegal, or otherwise objectionable material or content.”

This problem here is self-evident. Remove all the pornographic, obscene, offensive, threatening, harassing, libelous, hate-oriented, harmful, defamatory, racist, illegal, or otherwise objectionable material or content from our discourse and you have removed most of the “free speech” spoken by most people. The Politically Correct Posse at Colby, led by its president, discovered a lot of free speech being communicated by Yik Yak which they don’t like. They call it hate speech, not free speech, but there is no real distinction between the two worth making

The problem is that a lot of people, who don’t spend a lot of time thinking, think that since free speech is a good thing and hate speech is a bad thing then it must follow that hate speech can’t be called free speech.

Just in my lifetime, between 1940 and 2015, many forms of communication once prohibited by social convention and even law as pornographic, obscene, and offensive have grown common and even popular. In the twenty-first century social convention has nearly driven the notorious ‘N-word’ from public use while a whole dictionary of obscenities and curses have become available to sweet little girls in middle schools. The First Amendment and lesser laws allow both smelly obscenities and every kind of racial epithet, but social convention now allows an exhaustive range of obscenities and pornography while inhibiting the use of racial epithets and slurs in public. Yik Yak allows them both under the cover of anonymity. It provides unrestricted free speech for timid and sneaky people.

Bowdoin’s Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster is particularly concerned about Yik Yak for that very reason. “I have really strong feelings about anonymity—this thing to me is a cesspool,” he explains “Freedom of speech doesn’t assure anonymity. If you want to say something, put your name behind it.” Dean Foster hasn’t expressly taken the position that sneaky and timid people should be denied freedom of speech but he certainly implies this.

My old employer, Middlesex County College, and many other institutions guarantee strict anonymity when they ask students to fill out faculty evaluation forms. I don’t know if Bowdoin uses such evaluation forms, but I suggest that Dean Foster might want to reconsider his claim that free speech can be separated from anonymity. I don’t think that can be done, and I don’t think it can be separated from sheer nastiness either.

Colby’s agitation about Yik Yak last week was inspired by a spate of “Hate Speech” provoked by the college’s earlier “Black Lives Matter” demonstration. More importantly, it served as a convenient pretext for the usual wails, and weeping, and tearing of hair and rending of garments about the horrors and terrors of Western Civilization, the Unites States, and white men. This commonly loops back to condemn any defense of those three villainous objects as hate speech. The end result, whether intended or merely idiotic, is suppression of free speech.

Professor John Frary of Farmington, Maine is a former US Congress candidate and retired history professor, a Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United and publisher of www.fraryhomecompanion.com and can be reached at: [email protected]