Death threat on chat app Yik Yak leads to Missouri arrest

Despite what you may think, you are not anonymous on Yik Yak. I am Bridget Cary, this is your CNET update. [MUSIC] The so called anonymous social media app Yik Yak, is in the news again. Surrounded by controversy over people using it to do awful things. Yik Yak is an app where you can keep your identity a secret from other users. And you can see everything written by people near your general location. You can think of it as a local message board where you don't know the names of who is posting. On Tuesday students at the University of Missouri noticed hateful, racist His threats of violence against black students and faculty posted on Yik Yak warning people to not go to campus. If you've been following the news, you know that this adds to the racial tensions on campus, where students and faculty are protesting How the school is dealing with racism. Well guess what, the university police arrested the suspect who posted those threats to Yik Yak. Yik Yak works with the local authorities to track down people who do such things and violate the rules. What you do online is not anonymous just because an app advertises as such. And this is an ongoing problem with Yik Yak, with morons who think they won't be found. There were four mass shooting threats made on Yik Yak at four different universities in the past 30 days. And you can find multiple reports of similar threats and hateful posts at school campuses Going back to last year. Yik Yak is also just a breeding ground for cyber bullying and mean gossip when no one's names are published. And every time I open it up, I'm looking at the worst of the internet. I couldn't even show you the feed from my own phones app because it was too nasty. I would have to just blur out the whole screen. It's just garbage. Well, let's move on to another social media app, Mickey News. And I do mean Mickey News. Facebook is diving deeper into the news business with an app called Notify. The Notify app sends you news alerts from a variety of different publications. You pick the topics you're interest in like tech or sports. Or you could get specialized reports from just one publication such as the daily morning forecast from The Weather Channel or sports score reports from your favorite team. And if you tap into the notification It will take you to the full article or video. It's right now only for iPhone users in the U.S. the benefit is that you can get lots of news alerts, without having to download the app for each of these separate news outlets. Facebook getting into news shouldn't surprise you. Every social media app these days wants to be in news hub. Just look at snapchat discover,twitter moments and Apple's news app. But Facebook's biggest challenge will be to get people to care to download it. Facebook has many other apps that have struggled like Paper, Rift, Moment, Slingshot and Rooms to name a few. That's it for this tech news update and there's more at cnet.com from our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.