When gunfire erupted on Brown University’s campus this month, many students first learned something was wrong not through an official alert, but from a post on social media.
Now, the company behind Yik Yak and Sidechat — anonymous social apps popular among college students — has introduced new a safety-focused feature in direct response to the shooting, designed to push verified information to the top of student feeds during emergencies.
“In the moment, that was actually one thing that we didn’t have — support for something [a post] that was so clearly from us,“ said Kyle Venn, CEO of Yik Yak and Sidechat…