After School app will alert cops, schools if teens make violent threats

Teenagers who use the popular new app After School to threaten their school or classmates may find police waiting for them when they arrive.

Hundreds of thousands of high school students have flocked to the app to anonymously talk about anything and everything. But in response to fears that some will use the app to threaten their school or classmates, After School’s makers are readying a new feature designed to automatically alert police and educational administrators to potential dangers.

After School, of course, isn’t the only app that lets people anonymously discuss what’s on their mind. Others include Yik Yak, Secret, and Whisper. But After School has grown quickly by focusing solely on teens, and although it is available only for iOS — used by less than half of American high school students — Michael Callahan, co-creator of the app, said the app’s adoption is growing at “exponential” rates.

Other apps, too, have been used to make threats. Last month, for example, San Diego police arrested two teens for making threats via Yik Yak against high schools there, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

After School launched on iOS on November 13 and already has 200,000 users from more than half of the 28,000 high schools in the U.S., Callahan told VentureBeat.

Many see it as a way to safely talk about difficult things in their lives, like drugs, suicidal thoughts, or sexual orientation, without worrying classmates will know who they are.

Already, though, some have used After School to talk about bringing a gun to school. And that has alarmed parents, administrators, and police.

That’s why After School is getting ready to launch First, a tool that will monitor After School posts for serious threats — things like students claiming to have a gun or a bomb — and then automatically send alerts to local law enforcement and school administrators if one is issued. The tool is expected to launch January 6, close to the day many schools will reopen after winter break.

With First, After School monitors incoming posts for keywords like “gun,” “bomb,” “knife,” and others, and if one or more is detected, First automatically sends an alert to the appropriate authorities, Callahan explained.

Callahan told VentureBeat that After School also plans to make First available to other social networks and apps via an API. However, he said, After School is not yet ready to automatically tackle less dire forms of cyberbullying. He wouldn’t say when anti-bullying tools would be ready.

But some school administrators are already looking forward to First’s benefits.

“While I think that there are still challenges presented by anonymous posting [apps], these are steps in the right direction,” said Matt Outlaw, the superintendent of schools in Brandon, Mich. “Hopefully this will deter other people from using this application for things such as threats. I appreciate After School’s efforts to address the challenges that have been presented to schools.”

Until First launches, After School’s system requires someone on the app’s monitoring team to manually determine if a threat has been made, and, if so, to personally reach out to the appropriate authorities. That can, of course, be a cumbersome process.

Time to prepare

Although After School is anonymous, its makers hope that the automatic alerts from First will be enough to give police and school administrators the ability to prepare in advance for possible violence. Also, Callahan said, the app may be able to give police some identifying information about the app’s users, like their IP address.

Until now, this kind of monitoring and alerting has been entirely manual, Callahan said. He recalled a situation recently in which someone made a threat, which he noticed late at night, leading him to personally attempt to alert school and police officials. Clearly, he added, that is not scalable.

“We wanted to get on top of this and these types of messages,” Callahan said. First “should cut that whole process down from something that could take an hour or more to seconds.”

First depends on a manually-curated list of local police and school administrators, so if a threat comes in through the app related to a school that isn’t in After School’s database, any alerting would still have to be done manually, Callahan said.

After School will still retain its monitoring team, which watches posts for threats or cyberbullying, often because someone has flagged them. In either case, regardless of whether authorities are contacted, the team may decide to remove offensive posts.

Callahan said there’s little to be done about people using apps like After School to threaten or bully others. But he said he hopes the new tools can help make the app a safer place by giving monitors and authorities the ability to stop dangerous behavior before it gets out of control.

“Platforms like ours make it easy for people to communicate freely,” Callahan said, “and with that comes responsibility. That includes the responsibility for making people safe.”