- Gen-Z beloved site Omegle has shut down. It’s not something I’m sad about.
- The site’s founder in a long post raised some interesting points about how the internet has changed.
- But Omegle relied on Section 230 to absolve it from child exploitation on the site. It didn’t work.
Omegle is shutting down — and the lengthy screed posted by the site’s founder announcing its closure got me thinking.
Founder Leif K-Brooks’ missive touches on some compelling issues on how the internet has changed since he founded the site in 2009 when he was 18. Gone is the magic and playfulness of connecting with other people you’d never met in real life, and instead there’s fear and hate among people — and sameness on social platforms. I felt that.
K-Brooks didn’t explicitly disclose the reason the site shut down. (Omegle did just settle a lawsuit that contained some horrible allegations of child abuse.) But he did allude to “attacks” on the platform that he said he no longer cared to fight:
As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight — coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse — are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.
The bigger context here is that Omegle had a serious issue with sexual content and minors.
A 2021 BBC report on the problems it found on Omegle was alarming. The headline: “Omegle: Children expose themselves on video chat site.” And an organization that monitors online safety had 77,000 reports in 2020 of “self-generated” child sex abuse materials coming from the site.
Last week, Omegle settled the lawsuit, the AP reported. It had been filed in Oregon in 2021. In the civil suit, a woman claimed she had been exploited and blackmailed into producing explicit material — starting when she was just 11 — by a man in his late 30s who she met on Omegle.
Omegle had tried to claim protection under Section 230, the federal law that basically says that platforms aren’t responsible for their users’ posts (with some caveats). The judge ruled against it, on grounds that its product was defective by design. “Omegle could have satisfied its alleged obligation to Plaintiff by designing its product differently — for example, by designing a product so that it did not match minors and adults,” the judge wrote.
As K-Brooks’ message said, all platforms are susceptible to bad actors — and child predators certainly exist on other social sites, too.
But the combination of Omegle’s apparent appeal to teens and children, its anonymity, its ability to connect children to random adults in private conversations, and its tolerance of nudity all set it apart from many other social platforms.
This was a platform that seemed almost perfectly designed to allow some adults to take advantage of its product flaws to target children.
Omegle said on its front page that you had to be “18+ or 13+ with parental permission” to use it. (By late 2022, the requirement stated “18+ only.”) But it didn’t require any actual age verification, so there was no way of blocking underage users.
The site wasn’t completely unmoderated, and it was not unaware of the possible dangers to children. According to K-Brooks’s post, Omegle had worked with law enforcement and “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,” he said in his statement Thursday.
And K-Brooks’s note stood out from other announcements of a website or service shutting down. It was highly personal. He disclosed that he was a victim of child rape himself — and he was thoughtful about the current state of internet culture. (K-Brooks, who founded a new company called OctaneAI, did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.)
But his post also showed a very early internet attitude about trust and safety and content moderation — that bad actors will always exist, and there’s just nothing you can do about them. That the platform is totally neutral and that it’s not the platform’s fault if bad things happen.
There’s a clear reference to Section 230 in his post: “Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother ‘happy birthday’, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat.”
Omegle was a communication tool — and it was used for harm, according to the lawsuit and multiple reports from the BBC and elsewhere. But Section 230 doesn’t offer a blanket protection to any website for anything bad that happens.
In his farewell message, K-Brooks wrote some poignant things about the state of the internet, and how it’s changed since he founded the site 14 years ago. He described how as a young person, he longed for safe connection with strangers, and said the serendipity of those fun moments was magical. He also said he is worried about the future:
I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV — focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.
In general, I agree. I, too, mourn the loss of the joy and whimsy of the early internet, the excitement of early social networks, and bemoan the current state of bland sameness — every platform racing to be just like Tiktok.
But with Omegle, it’s hard to not see that the negatives simply outweighed the positives. There was so much apparent danger to children for so long — and it seems that danger went unchecked without any truly meaningful changes to the site that would have prevented it.
There are a lot of sites from Web 2.0 that I’ll miss — Flickr, LiveJournal, old Twitter, Geocities, even Tumblr’s heyday. But Omegle isn’t one to be sad about.
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