App: Fleek

“I think people genuinely feel it’s anonymous and there are no repercussions for it, but people can screenshot it and it’s dangerous.” UND Student Body President Matt Kopp said. “I mean, if a future employer sees something like that, you’re out of the applicant pool.”

Fleek, named after a complimentary slang word interchangeable with “on point,” is one of several apps that allow anonymous posts grouped by location or college. UND Police Department Sgt. Danny Weigel had already been monitoring a few apps, including the now-nonexistent Fade, Yik Yak and Unseen, but hadn’t heard of Fleek yet.

“It literally changes so often. Unless it’s Snapchat, Twitter or Facebook, they tend to go away after a while,” he said.

Fleek is still new; as of Thursday, its Twitter account only had 41 followers. It was created by a New York City-based startup company, is rated for those 12 years old or older and is marketed as “your unofficial campus story that WON’T GET BANNED by Snapchat.”

Kopp said Fade was the most commonly used app of that nature last year at UND and was often used to insult or bully people or student groups while being rife with nudity and drug use.

“It was absolutely disruptive,” he said.

A watchful eye

Fleek is as anonymous as users want it to be. Weigel said along with running the department’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, a lot of the work he does involves taking the time to flip through photos and videos posted to apps like Fleek.

“It’s a lot to manage, and along with that, I also work investigations full time,” he said.

Since this kind of policing is fairly new and not common across the country, Weigel uses his own judgement to decide whether something in an image is worth pursuing.

“If you’re seeing something that’s alarming, maybe that’s something we screen shot and try to correlate where it came from, and if it’s something serious, obviously we’ll want to look at it, but we want to educate our students that these pictures are out there.”

To prove the point during an interview Wednesday, Weigel opened the anonymous app Unseen, which he said temporarily replaced Fade, and began scrolling down through images of text boxes and a closeup of a female’s posterior.

Fleek also has an “after dark” category specifically for sexually explicit images.

Weigel said the department can get a search warrant, as they could with entities like Twitter and Snapchat, to find out who has posted an image if it becomes part of a criminal case or investigation.

Snapchat created a “campus stories” feature that works based on GPS location, though UND doesn’t appear to have one, but Snapchat also has a policy of removing content or suspending accounts if a person posts pornography, sexual photos or threats.

Weigel said locally, he simply tries to be proactive and wants to encourage the department to be a part of the conversation.

“This is how our students are communicating,” he said. “This is how we want to communicate with them as well.”

Staying ahead

Last spring, which marked the first year an annual festival that largely revolved around drinking was canceled, a student asked University Police through Twitter if they had busted any parties, and Weigel responded.

“I just tweeted back, ‘We haven’t, but if we do, I’ll be sure and let you know,'” he said. “It went over really well, and those are some of the fun conversations you can have over social media and engage with your students.”

The use of social media is an proactive approach the department has taken to enforcing the law. Weigel said he ideally wants to use the medium of communication to address problems presented by apps like Fleek or Yik Yak.

For example, if using a certain type of drug became prevalent on one of those apps, he could use Twitter or Facebook to inform the community of the dangers and penalties of using that drug.

“A lot of people who come to a college campus, they’re still people you can mold into wanting to do the right thing,” Weigel said.

Weigel said he’d like for the department’s Twitter account to grow from it’s current 1,800 followers to 10,000 and attends as many training sessions and webinars as he can to stay on top of what’s on apps like Fleek.