Swansea students expressed their dismay this week over the deletion of the popular snapchat sharing group ‘swanseastudents’. The popular image sharing site allows users to post ‘snaps’ to friends with the images either disappearing after opening, or removed after 24 hours from a person’s timeline. The owner of the snapchat group would add users and post the snaps received to the account, via a third party computer program.
The group was created and advertised through another popular social media app used by students ‘yik yak’. Yik yak allows any individual within a specific range to post anonymously to a message board, where “yaks” usually disappear within a period of 12 hours from the board. The group was launched at the beginning of the exam period and was advertised as a way for students to waste time and procrastinate, to get away from the stress of the exam season. It quickly became an app for anonymous Swansea students to post a variety of risqué pictures, from “nudes” to drug use. The group quickly became very popular at the campus with the owner boasting of over 5000 adds of the account shortly before its deletion.
A similar group at Cardiff University was recently shut down after university officials became aware of the existence of the group. The Snapchat was seemingly identical to the Swansea group, with students of both genders sharing x rated snaps to the group, with their faces usually covered. Students on yik yak at Swansea generally showed their upset over the deletion of the app, expressing that they were disappointed that it no longer existed. At the time of writing there is a push to create a similar group named ‘swanstudents’, but this group will likely share the same fate of the previous.
A student who did not wish to be named had this to say about the deletion “It’s really a shame, because while you can see why Snapchat would delete it, I don’t think there really was any harm in people posting to the group. I don’t see why the university had any business to get involved”.
University officials at Swansea don’t seem to have been involved in the deletion of the group at Swansea University, with Snapchat appearing to take proactive action in its deletion. If University officials have contacted Snapchat, it appears to not have been commented on publically. Swansea University declined to comment on the existence of the group at Swansea.
