Brown University students got shooting info on Yik Yak, prompting new safety features
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.
"There was so much that was critical that we couldn't do. We had to lend it to the community, to make sure that they're flagging and answering questions for the people that are actually in the moment," Venn explained. "Providing better resources that are very clear with concrete updates would be very, very useful."
The fatal mass shooting at Brown University broke out around 4 p.m. on Dec. 13 inside the Barus and Holley building on campus, killing two students and injuring nine others. Claudio Manuel Neves Valente , the 48-year-old man suspected behind both that attack and the fatal shooting of an MIT professor on Dec. 15, was found dead on Dec. 19.
Since then, the Brown University police chief was placed on leave and investigators continue to search for a motive in the attacks.
In the wake of the mass shooting and reflecting on how his team tried to respond, Venn says his company has added a feature that will push information on their apps to the top of student feeds during crises.
"We've since actually added a functionality so that we [company moderators] could pin posts to the top from us, so that we would be able to alert the community, or link out to live updates that we know are coming from reputable sources," Venn said.
The first posts about the shooting made by students at Brown University on Sidechat appeared around 4:06 p.m. on Dec. 13, according to Venn.
The apps, widely used by college students since Yik Yak was released in 2014, are location-based and require an email address that ends with ".edu" to sign up. They are designed for students to post anonymously and, in majority, are full of jokes or social commentary on campus life.
"Why are people running away from B and H?" read the first post from Brown University students on Sidechat on Dec. 13. Another at 4:10 p.m. told students, in all capital letters, that there'd been a shooting and to "stay away" from Thayer Street near MacMillan Hall.
Moderators have the capacity to verify information on the apps in about 42 seconds on average, Venn explained.
But because this was such a fast-moving and uncertain public safety situation, Venn and his team chose to not aggressively filter students' posts at first, so as to not risk suppressing potential early warnings.
The moderators instead focused on elevating posts that cited reputable or official sources, as students fact-checked each other in the comments until the school's first official "BrownUAlert" came at 4:22 p.m.
"In the moment, the community was doing so much to either support one another or to alert each other, and it did feel like there wasn't a lot that we could do to help," Venn said.
"That's something that I think the team has been reflecting a lot on to make sure that we could be even more useful in the future in times like this," he said. Venn said the new functionality for moderators to publish live updates was added in the weeks after the shooting.
Brown University Shooting, Dec. 13, 2025
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