It is a hardly known social network, which never appears in the list of the most downloaded or used. Yubo is a long way from Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, or Discord. However, in recent days this platform has risen to fame, although for a reason that is not what its creators would have wanted: Salvador Ramos, the murderer of the Uvalde massacre, was a Yubo user and, according to US media reports, he had warned of his intentions on that platform.
Yubo is a kind of Tinder for teenagers that has jumped to the forefront for being used by the Uvalde shooter
First known as Yellow, Yubo is a social network that mixes streaming video broadcasts with the usual messaging and posting options. This social network was founded in 2015 in Paris and can only be accessed from a mobile phone, either with an Android or iOS operating system.
Yubo users are mainly teenagers and young adults. The 99% of their active profiles correspond to people between the ages of 13 and 25. According to the digital analytics firm Sensor Tower, the Yubo app accumulates 18 million downloads in the United States.
For a time, Yubo used the slogan “Tinder for teenagers” as a commercial claim. Initially, the creators of Yubo conceived their app as a way to connect Snapchat users. In this social network, the posts are not public and it is not possible to search for other profiles, so the creators of Yubo thought it would be a good idea to give young people a platform to meet people.
In this way, the Yubo team built an app where Snapchat users could contact strangers with a mechanism identical to that of Tinder, passing them to the left or to the right.
This is not the first time that this app has been at the center of controversy. In 2019, a 26-year-old man was arrested in the United States who used this platform to contact minors. Since then, Yubo has improved its identity verification systems and tries to keep older and teen profiles separate on the app.
