After School is the newest app tearing up the ITunes download charts, currently sitting in 13 of the Top Free Apps. After School is an app where teenagers from the same high school can connect and post anonymously about anything they want.
As you can imagine, letting teenagers run free on the internet could be a problem. There were horror stories about the app all over; girl’s had their numbers shared without permission and even an after school shooting was stopped after someone posted about their intentions on After School.
After a successful petition , Apple had taken down After School from iTunes last year. Now, after a year and $16.4 million raised in funding, the app is back and spreading like wildfire.
Breaking Into The Kid’s App
I wanted to see if it was possible to get into this “secret society app” so I put my Journalism cap and downloaded After School . Since my facebook profile has my high school still attached, I thought it would be easy to just sneak right in. After connecting Facebook to the app, it prompted me to ask a few people to verify that I actually go to the High School. I don’t exactly have a lot of high schoolers in my contacts, so I had to get creative (I just added random people). After School then texted those people and I had to explain why they were getting texts inviting them to an app they were ten years too old for.
Needless to say it didn’t work.
A younger brother of a friend is still in the high school, so I took a shot in the dark and messaged him on Facebook if he’s using this After School app all the kids are raging about. He says “yeah, I actually use it.” I am finally going to get a look at what teenagers talk about when they think nobody's looking.
What Horror Stories Did I Find?
After browsing through the app for around an hour, I can say without a doubt modern teenagers are boring as fuck. I couldn’t find anything scandalous, risqué or interesting in the slightest. There were posts about break ups and crushes.
There were posts about sex.
And then there were break up posts about sex.
If you live in a Midwestern town and still find Dirty Dancing too nasty for your kids to enjoy, the things said in this app might upset you. Still for the rest of us, it’s not really a big deal. Kids have always needed ways to talk without their parents and new apps like Yik Yak have become big scares for the media to capitalize on.
Parents like to put their fears into things they don’t understand. This app is completely closed off from them, their kids could be doing anything! Everytime parents find the new “crazy” app, kids just switch to the next one. Instead of watching your kids like a hawk, it might be better to just teach them how to use social media and trust that they won’t screw up. Trust me, the app is not as risque as the media puts it out to be. The truth isn’t as sexy as the secret.
It seems like kids might actually be getting smarter about what they post on social media, or at least in my small town.
