From what I understand, Omegle made significant efforts in terms of moderation. Parents and guardians need to have ultimate accountability for educating and moderating their children’s internet consumption.

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.

That’s why this is complicated: If a business knows criminal or dangerous activity is taking place on their platform, there is some obligation to make a good faith effort to address the situation. The expectation isn’t perfect enforcement because it’s not reasonable to shut every large business down as soon as 1 incident occurs, but if a platform becomes known as a haven for certain types of behavior then their liability continues to go up. Given how many people in this thread are joking about how Omegle was known as a free-for-all platform for people exposing themselves and as a platform for bored kids, it’s not surprising that the lawsuits are coming. Also, given their limited monetization options it’s not surprising that they choose to close rather than deal with legal battles.

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.

Omegle became a safe haven for pedophiles and sex predators, and they are responsable for enabling them and not protecting their users.

There are other chat and video-chat sites that not only enforce their rules, they protect their users and ban those who don't follow the rules.

No, don't expect that from car manufacturers, they make cars not rules. Omegle, instead, made 'the car' and the rule not allowing minors in the site to avoid their responsibilities by law. They didn't enforce that rule and endangered them.

I think to your question is flawed because no one is specifically enabling this. The robust and "easy" solution that people seem to think they deserve actually doesn't exist. Every possible solution to online sexual predation has big costs: either massive collective effort by childrens' caregivers, loss of privacy for practically everyone (and the consequent dangerous power imbalance that comes with that), loss of intergenerational social interaction... Seriously, not letting kids interact with adults outside their immediate family is another kind of harm.

Personally I think the least-bad solution is getting better at the status quo: platforms police content, authorities punish predators when caught, and parents take care of their kids and police their relationships and/or teach them what they need to protect themselves.

Because of what I know about the internet and because I know what kids will do with unlimited access, I think much of this burden should be with the parents. For every successful Omegle taken down, 3 more unknown ones will pop up. But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.

As long as parents are never held accountable for their kids online behavior and the blame is put on service providers, this will only get worse. I know many examples of parents who track their kids' phones because they're scared something will happen to them in the real world. Meanwhile, these same parents pay no attention at all to where their kids venture in the online world, let alone with who. Parents need to be educated on this, fast.

The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't think we want to close wikipedia.

The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's not an excuse for parental neglect.

Parents tend to assume that "the internet" is regulated, somehow, whether by laws or market pressures. The thinking goes something like "Instagram is safe, right, because how could it not be? It's used by so many people, and if it could harm our kids, how would it be allowed to exist?" - right or wrong, people expect platforms to be held to some standard, and, right or wrong, put trust in the platforms to meet their expectations of safety.

The thing about Omegle was that it very much was the private room scenario I described above. I left out the part that made the room "safe" - the eject button. But persuasive people can persuade other people, especially children, to avoid that eject button, and while that only happened to some of the 74 million people using the site, it happened to people. And for those it happened to, those encounters wouldn't haven't happened without Omegle's help.

If you don't believe that, consider all those commenting here about how unique and special Omegle was for people who were good to one another. There's, thankfully, a lot of those comments.

But both things can be true, and were true when Omegle was operating. With 74 million people using it, the smallest of fractions of a percent still represent more than zero people experiencing harm that Omegle enabled.

The parents blame the platforms because the platforms enabled the harm.

The BBC article above states that Omegle is being mentioned in 50 pedophilia cases in the last 2 years. If 20% of kids would be scared to click "I'm older than 13", that would be 10 cases fewer.

Results called "kids on omegle showing" suggests that the kids were being prompted by predators to produce child pornography on social networks. There has got to be some rule about letting kids access these social networking platforms. Who could possibly think it's a good idea to let a child post their photos videos and profile information online and leave that open to the public for any predator who wants to reach out to them. And what's worse these kids are probably using these things unsupervised.

I wonder how a search company could hope to really effectively combat this content considering it's probably constantly being produced and circulated on a daily basis. Although one should expect them to keep track of and closely monitor keyword phrases routinely associated with child porn.

To go even further, it seems the same issues occur on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and those sites don't have to install kernel level anti-cheat to ensure you don't look at illicit content. At the same time, I would argue that this shows that kid-unfriendliness is an internet-wide problem and maybe we should be doing more in general to build an internet that works for kids.

I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.

I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume kids are on the Internet.

In any case, none of what you said actually responds to my questions -- why are the victims the ones being punished here? What did they do to deserve being silenced other than being themselves?

Yes, what these platforms are doing is exploitative, and that's a real separate issue that needs to be solved. But the right solution isn't this victim-blaming discrimination.

It's far easier to argue that TikTok et al are exploitative, it's much harder to discuss the proper solution to the issue that the thread is talking about. Let's keep it to that.

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.