Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor
wired.com
wired.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199355 (950+ comments)
By that logic you could say the same thing about every single porn site.
According to the BBC, it was only after “Alice” filed the lawsuit that they added a checkbox saying you had to be 18+.
Children 13+ were formally allowed to use the site with parental permission until after the lawsuit at issue was filed, but even that restriction was just, I think, a pro-forma fine print footer notice to provide CYA against COPPA requirements on sites that were directed at kids under 13.
I think I'd usually have to connect and disconnect two or three times before I found another human face and not a, uh, head. Although sometimes we'd have a seemingly normal conversation for a bit and then whoever we were talking to would pan the camera down and reveal that he was cranking it.
Fun stuff!
Omegle has been a great place for content creators [1], people learning languages [2], LGBT youth escaping their religious/rural upbringings, etc.
I hope you don't take this fight to VRChat [3, 4, etc]. That might just be too much freedom for people.
Shame on people trying to kill these platforms.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbjpkSkJvw8 (CodeMiko regularly trolls Omegle)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/D4bbyY_0Wng (this is great)
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T1T6X_B9CI (just skimming these, but it's innocent fun)
Parents should be responsible for their own children. They shouldn't keep trying to remove things from the world they deem as unfriendly to their children. If they dislike the Wild West of the Internet, they can create their own digital curfew and rules.
If you're looking for absolute, unfettered fuck-the-law freedom you're not going to find it on the open web. No administrator is going to be willing to take the bullet for you.
If you mean, for instance, Kiwifarms - their ISP and Cloudflare refused to do business with them for reasons other than being "antiliberal." You can't blame opposition to heinous behavior, or not wanting to do business with or be associated with KF, on simply being opposed to free speech. But they still exist, AFAIK. Gab was similarly "cancelled" by their host and service providers, because the platform itself and its behavior had become too toxic to be associated with, and violated terms of service for those partners.
Again, free speech doesn't guarantee a platform - it's a marketplace of ideas and you have to convince people your ideas are worth their time, doubly so where business associations are involved. Gab was fine until they started planning an insurrection and cheering on mass shooters. Trump was fine until he lost his mind and threatened the peaceful transfer of power. Omegele was fine until someone sued over the one thing Omegele is known for. There are always limits, everywhere. There are plenty of reasons to not want to be associated with such platforms and their content besides opposition to freedom of speech, but conflating everything into the actions of an "antiliberal movement" seems like bad faith.
So I don't know. You see attacks on free speech, I see the inevitable consequences of bad actors pushing things too far.
And I still wouldn't hold up Omegle as an example of the same class of problem. Freedom of speech should cover political disagreement and debate, but it shouldn't cover sexual abuse.
Every web site I ever built with ANY political content was vandalized by my hosting providers then disabled.
Also, Omegle didn't host political content. Also, no one vandalized it or took it down until someone sued the site owners over a crime being committed, not for any political expression.
I dream of being able to healthy discuss stuff like "illegal crossing/immigration of mexicans" or "US gun control/freedom" , or even more touchy subjects like "pedophilia, as a mental sickness".
But in a place that is heavily moderated, free if bigots, knee jerk reactions and all those behaviours that online discussions are plagued with.
I am a Mexican myself, and I love being subscribed to the r/ccw subreddit (concealed carry). I've learned a lot and although I dont agree with a lot of the culture there, i am happy to try understand where pro-gun people are coming from.
There is nuance to every issue, and the only real way to make progress is to be able to establish a dialogue bringing forward and listening to all sides of the conversation.
You call those "touchy subjects"? Do "Jewish history" and watch it get shut down in a week.
You also can’t generally criticize the police or military or social order beyond the standard “everybody knows” talking points.
Honest discussions of how society should deal with and treat people who are afflicted with pedophilia is another. There are entire swaths of viewpoints which are basically not allowed to be expressed, including most/all of the compassionate ones.
Criminal justice reform and the prison-industrial complex.
Atheism.
Suicide, and people’s rights thereto.
Drug usage, and people’s rights thereto.
The occasional need and right of a populace to employ violent revolution to secure human rights.
The illegitimacy of state violence.
Artistic nudity (I’m a portrait photographer).
Non-artistic nudity (porn is great).
Artistic non-mainstream porn (weird BDSM stuff is great).
Individual responsibility of people doing immoral jobs. People get absolutely outraged at true reporting of facts (“John Doe, whilst at $EMPLOYER, implemented unethical feature $X”).
Criticism of group identity, or discussion of the legitimacy of identity politics in general.
Jokes or memes about any of the previous, or sexual violence, or tragic deaths.
Increasingly, anti-war viewpoints. The global west is heavily invested in any enemies of Russia or China being unswervingly supported. Being anti-war is more and more a fringe position that is subject to censorship.
Criticizing the major publishing platforms, on those platforms themselves. You won’t be able to run an Amazon workers union site on AWS, for example. Nor can you discuss CCP censorship on TikTok.
Lots of things are off limits in most parts of the internet. People who think the only people complaining about the restrictions on speech online are nazis or pedos are... fairly unimaginative.
In terms of having actual discussion, sneak laid out a good range of topics that quickly get derailed in flame wars (IME). I'll personally add homelessness and mental health as a few more very touchy topics.
I know high quality, nuanced discussion isn't a 1st amendment right, but that's what the other half of the conversation wants while most argue with the strawman half that wants to be racist/sexist online.
I can see how their model -- letting people scroll through images until they saw one they liked -- contributed to the issue. I also feel like there are larger societal issues that foster such problems and going after the tech is probably a relatively weak solution that tends to make people comfortable with leaving other issues unresolved.
I think it's like a scapegoat. It's easier to go after and it makes people feel like they did something when they did little, if anything, most likely.
that's my feelings and unfortunately going after the middleman is an increasingly popular strategy. It's more a matter of how many lawyers the website can throw at the issue because every single site that allows user hosted content will run into this issue. Sweeping the problem further under the rug instead of funding actual solutions.
The park analogy that the creator of omegle made is interesting, we don't shutdown parks because a crime may take place there.
And why not just remove video chat completely and keep the text chat and with higher moderation and tools, it should have been possible to keep the problems at bay.
We might try to out reason the following argument but I do believe it demands reflection. Omegle was about the only popular mass media which was fully distributed, allowed for random encounters with people.
I am reminded of Aaron Swartz. And, I have a deep suspicion that Omegle's shutdown being part of the lawsuit settlement has a lot more to the story. And probably the creator also had to sign NDA or something.
I am sure that was very possible. But from the tone of the creator's last post, it sounds like this was the camel that broke the camel's back, after years of straw that was already on the way to breaking it. He just sounded like it was becoming harder to manage and affecting his mental health. A single lawsuit will certainly do damage, but it didn't sound like the only factor in closing it down.
Because they try to mitigate CSAM with moderation.
Moderation is not censorship despite what some HN big brains might think
> I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.
> Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.
--
The real reason, of course, is that Facebook can afford an army of lawyers, but Omegle can't.
Small companies can participate, as long as their moderation resources are proportionate to their scale.
Yes, if they aren't, you are going to have more liability problems, just like if you operate a theme park with inadequate maintenance staff to prevent the rides from flying apart and killing guests.
A better analogy involves things that are generally intended for adult purposes, as the Internet is. You certainly can operate a business selling construction tools, and generally not be sued when someone lets their kid use one and the kid gets injured. Even if you have knowledge that some customers will buy tools for use by their under age kids, or that they will leave tools accessible to kids, while you're merely assuming that they're supplying appropriate supervision and control.
The fundamental problem with this liability argument that has been put forth is it's based on responsibility laundering. Kids can't judge or consent, yet the argument quietly asserts it's reasonable for their caretakers to be absent in supplying appropriate judgement and supervision as they're interacting with the larger world. The resulting conclusion is that it is everyone else's responsibility to only ever act in ways that will protect those unrestrained kids. The direct implication is that everything accessible on the Internet must be made safe for kids, which is directly opposed to having free and open communications for adults.
Yet Omegle made more money and had more users than HN ever would, but consistently failed at moderation.
> small companies are not allowed to participate if they are not rich enough
It's been open knowledge to anyone who's been in middle and high school since 2010 (like yours truly) that Omegle is filled with creepy old guys.
There are plenty of small social media startups from that era that never had as much of a pedo presence as Omegle.
HN doesn't even allow text formatting changes beyond monospace and italics, much less posting pictures or video.
Even without moderation, you'd only be at risk of ASCII art schlongs.
Hah, rewind. There's literally a porn site on the front page right now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38213707
Hacker News is not and never has been a "business" in its own right. It's part of the business model of a VC fund -- Y Combinator -- and Forbes indicates they were worth $5 billion as of 2021.
Also, I don't think we know how many people moderate HN and never have.
I don't work here. I just hang here sometimes and have for years. I don't have reliable info.
But I am pretty sure you have no idea what you are talking about.
It's part of YC but I can confidently say only around 4-5 people are working on it including moderation. I can also say confidently that more resources are spent by YC on Bookface and their own internal BI tools than HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1837288
It's source page gives a 404 "not found" error.
The current official mod in charge pretty consistently says "no moderators did x."
This handle of mine only dates to 2017, but I originally joined in 2009, so I have no idea how long you have been hanging here, but I would be really shocked if they needed 30 moderators in 2010 and now have literally one guy doing all the moderation work by himself entirely.
I also doubt that people really in the know are posting here with "insider" info that wasn't cleared by staff.
It's not my business. I don't feel they need to tell me such info. But I have no reason to believe your uncited assertion that you can say X "with confidence" is reliable info of any sort.
The communities are very different and attract different crowds. The most dangerous sites are sites that connect groups who wouldn't connect in real life.
if you remember from some months ago, the HN filter has like 66 thousand sites that get auto-filtered. I wouldn't even be surprised if your comment is delayed if you have a link and it isn't from a whitelisted site, or a greylisted site (an imgur image can have a variety of things that you want to check first). When something amiss does get through, enough commenters can flag the content and have it temporarily unviewable until a mod can get to it.
That's hard to do with Omeagle's more intimate setting, and of course live streaming yourself.
>It's been open knowledge to anyone who's been in middle and high school since 2010 (like yours truly) that Omegle is filled with creepy old guys.
may as well expand that to the rest of the internet. Most social media don't work off of live chats, so that's a huge pain point in Omeagle's favor.
And to be frank, they do. They just have more moderation to control that. Wasn't uncommon to have ANY link comment delayed for such reason, if it wasn't outright banned. Words can only do so much damage.
Language is certainly interesting.
It's complicated. I don't blame Omegle, but sometimes there's no one to blame, except the perpetrators.
Now, thanks to AI, we could recreate Omegle and make it safer, like detect children using it, and detect abusers. Of course this may trigger an arm's race of filters. But I think we have avenues to try.
It could be safer but it's up to you to decide your family's risk/reward ratio. Safer getting a dick video online then in person and a teachable moment. These dicks are out there in the world. This could belong to your teacher, friend's dad, brother.. if you ever see this again call 911 and rin.
Any reductionist stance that "only" parents matter and society doesn't, or "only" this or "only" that betrays a lack of basic common sense. A child is a product of its environment, and the child and its parents exist in a society (so says Jared Leto). A child is like a radio antenna, it picks up information and influences from everywhere and reproduces them. A child that hits puberty also wants to do exactly the opposite of what you teach them, and be rebellious with the worst specimens in their class. Opening a chat site is probably the most innocent thing they can do, and if that innocent act can trivially lead to dire consequences, yes, society has a problem to solve.
The problem isn't Omegle in particular, but rather how unstructured the Internet is. Anything goes, you can therefore not shape and mold a child's environment to be nurturing and educational. If they have Internet you basically drop the entire world on their shoulders at once. Any filters and controls are at best leaky.
Okay, but I'd still call the parent the most important pillar in a child's life. Not the only one, but they have the most influence on a child. Every child is different, but most children will take a parents' action and words to heart and use those to form a world view. which can end with an accaptance or rejection of the parents'.
>The problem isn't Omegle in particular, but rather how unstructured the Internet is. Anything goes, you can therefore not shape and mold a child's environment to be nurturing and educational
sure you can. plenty of filters and blocks.
The key to elevate this from controlling your kid to parenting is to then explain why those blocks exist. We shouldn't be coy to tell kids that there is danger, that they should know how their body and feelings work, and that there is content they are not ready to view. They may still find workarounds anyway, but hard locks under "because I said so" or "I'll tell you when you're older" caused me to rebel way more than "because there are bad people out there" (as an oversimplified explanation).
And that's the crux that no one seems interested in solving. Why are we so afraid to educate our kids on this stuff?
Piling on responsibility on parents for the world they grew up in and are raising their children is one step away from saying "if you can't be a good parent, don't have children" which is one step away from "just don't have children" and that's why "developed" societies are in a deepening demographic collapse.
Also living in a global world is not just about your trinkets being made in China. Internet is a global network and it connects us globally. This "parents have most influence on a child" thing was I'd say valid maybe a century ago. But now parents are much more busy working, and children are engaging much more with society and the world at large, at much earlier age. This is not a choice a family makes. It's imposed top-down from society and its rulers, because the alternative is to not survive. And therefore it's society's responsibility as a whole to get things as straight as possible, before we can attack parents.
Again. Those parents are just products of their own parents and so on. And humans in general have absolutely no clue how this works. We go by vibes and superstition and events like the World Wars, depressions, recessions, cultural revolutions have completely disrupted and wiped out centuries of knowledge on what it means to raise a child, and everyone has to keep rediscovering this for themselves, which means they look out and copy what society gives them. We have no other way to operate. We copy, transform and emit.
But our ability as individuals to transform is limited. This is why you yourself are speaking the languages you speak, have the beliefs you do, you're just an amalgamation of things you saw and heard, and adopted them as your own. Including the belief we should blame the parents. That came from the society you live in. The irony.
Society and norms change. My "former children" were whipped by their parents, they didn't pass that down to me (but I was also raised partially by grandparents, who did the same thing). "we" decided spankings weren't acceptable anymore in a relatively recent time frame. But "we" still can't seem to teach future adults about their bodies and that bad people will take advantage of it.
It's a societal issue and I will critique society as they continue to brush the real issue under the rug. Perverts aren't some ancient monster wiped out by war, unfortunately.
>This is why you yourself are speaking the languages you speak, have the beliefs you do, you're just an amalgamation of things you saw and heard, and adopted them as your own.
Indeed. And my society taught me to think critique every practice, and to unshackle from tradition. "because that's how things were done" is the worst justification in my mind. Which you seem to be using to excuse this behavior.
I don't accept it. If only because of this simple norm: if we were thst influenced by our upbringing and this happens, that means we have an entire societal line that thinks it's okay to prey upon children. I hope we aren't taught that by friends or family or education.
>Including the belief we should blame the parents.
If society believed that, this story blaming a website for facilitating the abuse of a child instead of the parents who should have been aware of the child's browsing activity wouldn't be here, no?
I don't really subscribe much to the "you criticize society but you live in one" retort. Societal participation isn't very consentual in and of itself but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
You can watch documentaries on big scale disasters, and while in isolated cases you can blame few specific parties for failing on their responsibilities and therefore it's "their fault", the truth is that disasters occur when many many layers of a system fail, and eventually the whole construction collapses at some point, causing an unmitigated disaster.
In another comment I discussed how we could make a safe Omegle with identity confirmation and AI monitoring and so on. That would help. Not fix all problems, but help significantly. Parenting also helps, and so on. It's not either or, but "and". We can try to sort things by priority, but this is often crude and based on our limited understanding of what is most important.
Also saying "it's the parents" is particularly fruitless, because "parents" is not a specific entity, like government regulatory institutions or large businesses are, which are controlled centrally and therefore they can be designed, engineered, and monitored for specific outcomes.
When we say "the parents" everyone nods along and says "oh yes, absolutely" and nothing follows from that. Everyone believes themselves a good parent who's doing the right things, and to whom bad things won't happen. And when they happen, they see the problem outside themselves. It's also particularly cruel to pin blame on parents who have one or two children, and purely randomly their child may be taken out by freak circumstances. And then what? Make more children?
While a corporation may be involved in hundreds, thousands, millions of incidents, and they can and SHOULD learn from them and strive to minimize them. They have the scale to monitor outcomes, adapt for better outcomes and then monitor that change.
We could say "but OMEGLE was not a large organization with large staff able to engineer their outcomes". Well, then maybe they should've not taken on this project. Going viral by doing the minimum is easy especially when luck is on your side. But doing things RIGHT takes effort, money, time and people.
Personally my goal isn't to solve the entire problem. Because humans have a great talent of breaking even the most secure solutions. And on the internet that simply means "don't go to secure website, lure children to seedy website". So the problem occurs again and it's harder or impossible to target the seedy website (you know, unless parents properly parent. You know, the unproductive solution I keep bringing up). It may be more holistically safe but on a micro level that parent still has to suffer and that child is still traumatized. But you exhausted your easy target to sue.
In some views, Omeagle may be that seedy website as it. It wasn't this hyper popular trillion dollar company that entrenched itself in the recesses of the internet, Alexa ranking last month was in the top 700. gen alpha may not even know what people are talking about when hearing the name. But it was too honest and good hearted in intentions of and no good deed goes unpunished. So here we are.
>When we say "the parents" everyone nods along and says "oh yes, absolutely" and nothing follows from that.
Sure because "everyone" is in fact not "everyone" ajd certainly not any important lawmakers. On a micro level that solution is some sort of therapy to heal and maybe counseling to figure out how to parent for this stuff online if it wasn't taught in school (and for reference, my mid 00's middle school was already teaching about social media safety. This isn't that unheard of for millennial/Gen Z folks to learn). I can't make that decision for a single parent. Large initiatives include awareness, tools, and general tips for parents.
This is an absentee parent problem using the internet as a nanny.
Just because it is ubiquitous does not mean it is the correct way.
It's common for adults to simply make a lot of decisions for kids in a way that is "convenient" for the adult and they seem to not notice this has significant psychological consequences which impact sexual situations and cause other issues.
But I wouldn't pin this strictly on parenting. I think society has broader issues than just parenting which foster issues of this sort.
But in all seriousness, "parenting" is not a quantifiable resource. "Just be a better parent bro" isn't valid advice.
> There’s a flaw in K-Brooks’ argument: The telephone doesn’t connect children and teens directly to sexual predators with the click of a button. Omegle’s model allowed sexual predators to sign on and click through a roulette of people, continuously jumping from one to another until they were face-to-face with who they were looking for.
Yesterday's discussion about K-Brooks' statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199355
I used to answer the phone as a child and talk to complete strangers.
Telephone just isn’t a valid metaphor here.
But that's besides the point. If you don't want your kids to see peoples dicks on the internet than exhibit better control over your kids access to the internet.
It's not up to me and the rest of society to police your kids.
I don't want to lose an internet that has charming sites like Omegle because people can't be bothered to take care of their kids.