Recently, the popular app Snapchat has been surrounded in controversy. The Campus Story feature in particular has given rise conflict.

Snapchat is an app meant to take pictures and video that captures a moment as it’s happening.

Users take pictures then send them to their friends to be erased from the Snapchat server in less than ten seconds.

Snap stories are a series of snapchats, or snaps, that are saved for a period of a couple days and can be viewed multiple times by anyone that is friended by that account.

In order to combat a number of inappropriate widely-viewed snap stories that included graphic nudity, drug use and illegal activity posted to a Campus Story, Snapchat has added a new feature.

Campus Stories feature will now only allow appropriate pictures to be posted to a campuses feed.

In order to fill that gap and provide a media platform for all the snaps deemed inappropriate by Snapchat, a new app named Fleek – College Stories has appeared on the Apple iSO market.

The app is a cross between Snapchat and Yik Yak (an anonymous community forum app).

Upon downloading the new app, users must find their desired college.

Those who choose Central will come to a screen with two options: CWU Snaps, which contains fairly tame photos of college students and their various pets, and CWU After Dark, which mostly consist of nudity and drug use.

Students can submit pictures to either account, and then the account admin can choose to add or not add those pictures to the story feed.

From here, users upvote or downvote photos, deciding what visual stories stay on the feed and what comes down.

Darryl Galloway, sophomore construction hygiene major, has had Fleek – College Stories since the beginning of the quarter, after his peers told him about the app’s popularity.

“[CWU Snaps] is friendly stuff, but CWU After Dark is mostly female nudes,” Galloway said.

Galloway also felt that the app could have some negative repercussions.

“I support Fleek, but it is dangerous because of the opportunity for cyber bullying.”  Galloway said.

With the majority of college students constantly on social media, cyberbullying has the potential to be more of a threat on campus than ever before.

Jace Rowland, junior double major in music performance and music education, has a very different opinion of the app.

“Something like that is going to cause trouble and not produce good of any kind.” Rowland said.  

He has no intention of downloading the app due to its lewd content.

“As a future teacher, something like that would be crossing a lot of [moral and ethical] lines,”  Rowland said.

The format of Fleek – College Stories was interesting to Rowland, but he found CWU After Dark to be to questionable.

“I can understand the value of a community local based snapchat, but there are certain boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed,” Rowland said.

Released on Sept. 10, Fleek – College Stories is still a relatively young app and no apparent legal action has been taken against it.

Moe Izumi is a 20-year-old AUAP student and international leadership major from Japan.

Up until she came to America, Izumi had no access to Snapchat or Fleek.  

“I think an app like [Fleek – College Stories]…is interesting and people should be able to post what they want to post,” Izumi said. “We have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but not Snapchat [in Japan].”

Fleek – College Stories has made its way into the social media mainstream at Central and shows no signs of slowing down.