Last week’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, brought to light a little-known social media app called Yubo, which has a small but developing user base made up mostly of young people.
The French tech startup has gained little attention in the U. S. In the U. S. , at least among adults, but since the May 24 shooting, more than a dozen Yubo users have come forward to say they had interacted with a Yubo user they said was 18. Shooter, Salvador Ramos.
Their stories highlight a free culture hosted on the app for young teens and the perpetual migration of other young people to new sub-moderate social media platforms.
Lina, 17, thought she had identified Uvalde’s shooter, so she opened her phone’s camera roll and scrolled to find four screenshots and a recorded video of Yubo.
In the screen recording, a user who she believed was Ramos can be heard saying she “deserves to be raped. “
Lina, who spoke to NBC News on the condition that her last call not be revealed to her privacy, said she recorded the live verbal exchange after the user described being sexually competitive with an ex-girlfriend.
Several teens and young adults who use Yubo said they reported that the account was supposed to be Ramos’s, but the app seemed to be taking little or no action. Yubo users say it’s not unusual for bad habits to go unpunished on the app. which they say has a culture riddled with unwanted sexual assaults and content meant to offend other users.
Some hounds have dubbed Yubo the “Tinder for Teens” because it includes a swipe feature similar to that of the adult dating app that’s used to meet strangers, and Yubo combines that with other features like audio chat and live streaming to create a freewheel. live. .
Lina and a few other Yubo users who spoke to NBC News said they saw the teens enter video chat rooms in Yubo and divulge themselves, as well as send unsolicited nude photos in the chat.
Yubo, the first platform where teenagers have seamlessly exchanged sexual messages and video chats: In February 2021, a BBC investigation revealed cases of young children being exposed in front of the camera to strangers on the streaming site Omegle, but after Yubo users connected Ramos for the platform, some report what they see as a perceived lack of moderation in the app.
Matt Navarra, a representative for social media companies, said Yubo is “open to abuse. “
“It’s just as harmful or dangerous as many social platforms, but its teen-friendly design and the combination of many of the app’s features make it, unfortunately, the best typhoon for incidents and controversies among its users,” Navarra said.
Ramos’ alleged presence and habit on an app like Yubo highlights the continued creation of moderate social media spaces for young people and the inevitable negative attention paid to startups when they are forced to confront the habit of their user base.
Yubo, who was founded in Paris, said he cooperated with law enforcement and investigated an account related to uvalde’s shooting. He also said he had banned the account in question.
Yubo said it has a diversity of security features, adding buttons to report alongside point content, chat filters, and tracking live streams through software and employees.
“Yubo takes seriously our duty to protect our users,” the company said in a statement.
“We remain proactive in creating security measures for our users when they are in the app and are committed to implementing extensive security measures and tools,” adding age and identity verification and other types of content moderation, the company said.
Yubo, formerly known as Yellow, was introduced in 2015. Al following year, Tinder banned anyone under the age of 18 for the first time, pushing teens to look for other apps to meet other teens.
A big component of Yubo’s purpose is to meet new people and converse in small groups. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, said Yubo appears to have benefited from a backlash against apps like Instagram, where there is tension. to stream to a wide to get likes and followers.
“What many of them crave is more of an individual party with friends, anything that isn’t as organized or performative,” he said.
Activities of creating a social circle and bringing other new people together have moved online for many teens, Twenge said.
“They’re much less likely to have a current date on the user than past generations,” Twenge said.
According to information from Apptopia, a company that monitors mobile app usage, Yubo came to attention in 2020 when teens were in quarantine and had little to do. In April 2020, there were 756,241 downloads in the US, more than double the 343,062 downloads in April. 2019.
Since then, monthly downloads in the U. S. have been released. The U. S. fell to 343,642 in April, to Apptopia. This accounted for about 39% of all downloads worldwide.
“There has been a strong growth of the pandemic, like many of those social applications,” said Navarra, the consultancy, “due to the confinement and other people who need a place to chat with other people, chat with friends, share content and read content. “. “
Yubo’s user base is still small by social media standards.
About 60 million more people signed up for the app, and 99% of them were between the ages of 13 and 25, TechCrunch reported this month. according to Crunchbase, a company that tracks tech startups.
The company didn’t specify how many other people use the app or monthly, a more common way for social media apps to measure success.
Yubo follows a style established through other social media corporations where a startup targets teens to gather new users, said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit advocacy organization that supports stricter regulation of the generation aimed at children.
“These corporations see a lot of cash targeting young people, through classified ads or other services, and there’s no protection,” Chester said.
Chester, whose organization pushed for a 1998 privacy law that applies to children under the age of 13, said he doesn’t think tech companies regulate themselves for teens and that Congress deserves to pass a new law.
Experts and teens said Yubo didn’t advance the amount of resources he needed to moderate content well and respond to violations of his terms of service, such as racist and anti-LGBTQ slurs.
Screenshots of Yubo’s chats on other social media platforms, such as Reddit, show teens sending sexts and wondering about nude photos of others. comments about the app, and that they had reported it for intimidation and other crimes, but had never heard of or noticed any ongoing action taken through the company.
“There were other people who said very vulgar things,” Lina said.
“It wasn’t the craziest thing for someone to say something reactionary, so when they said crazy things live, a lot of other people didn’t take it as seriously as they deserved,” he said.
Lina then posted Yubo’s screenshots on Twitter and TikTok in an effort to debunk false claims spread on the web that a transgender user unrelated to Uvalde’s shooting was responsible.
Navarra, the industry consultant, said Yubo is not unaware of the possibility of abuse and misuse, and pointed to a recently added and more physically powerful age verification system.
“It has security features and moderation features,” he said. “Of course, none of this is foolproof, so there’s still a lot of fear and rightly so on the part of parents of teens who use the app. “
In April, Indiana state police said they would speak to anyone who contacted an express Yubo account in connection with the 2017 murders of two teenagers. Profiles similar to Yubo’s also made the impression on Instagram and Snapchat, NBC Chicago reported.
Even Yubo teens wonder if they deserve to stay on the app. Lina, who joined a discussion about Ramos about Yubo the day after the shooting, said other Yubo members were asking the app to take responsibility.
“It all started with a woman looking to bring together other people who opposed the app and said, ‘We hold Yubo accountable,'” Lina said. “In his experience, he had reported his account several times and it had never been deleted. “
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