ABSTRACT
Chapter 8: Is Yik Yak a Platform for Political Communication? Exploring College Students’ Communication on an Emergent Social Media Platform, Chris Vargo and Toby Hopp
This study used big data and computational methods to explore the degree to which college students use Yik Yak for political expression. While the number of political messages was small relative to the entire corpus, the data suggested that political communication on Yik Yak is responsive to major political events. Moreover, the data suggested that the percentage of political commentary on Yik Yak is negatively associated with size of the undergraduate population, the percent of classes with greater than 50 students, and the number of Greek organizations on campus.
