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.

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.

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.

Are we to look at all the kids that get groomed and manipulated by predators on a platform like Omegle and say "lol that sucks, wish you had better parents tho" or can we also elevate our expectations of platforms that connect kids to adults?

For a platform that connects kids to rando adults, I would expect some sort of filter. Even a $1 join fee would have been better than what Omegle had (nothing).

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.

I don't know Omegle so don't know what the balance should be here, but lots of tech products are built with a "move fast, figure out the complicated bits later", which is right but which doesn't fit well with these sorts of nuances.

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.

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.

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.

I'm in the unenviable situation of having had one of my big projects shut down for precisely this reason: it's too expensive to moderate sites that kids may use. The reason for that is actually very simple, proved by data, and verboten to say.

And at the same time I do think computer providers, Windows, Mac OS and all that don't offer good enough parental control.

Age verification is a problem as well, but it's foolish to think every website and app will implement proper safeguards. I mean, Omegle could simply be replaced by some darker Russian clone with even less effort put towards fighting crime.

Instead there should be opt in. When a child user is logged in to Windows et all, an allow list should always be in place. And only apps and websites that claim to be child safe should be included.

And parents must make sure to only let their kids use child accounts.

The idea that some KYC would be forced on all online website and apps just doesn't make sense otherwise.

And now it would be fair to sue websites that claim to be child safe and have opted in, if they turn out not to be.

Laws like the one proposed in the article are a way to push social media companies to start enforcing those rules better.

When you say "parental rights" - the issue is that parents DON'T have admin rights to their kids social media stuff.

Most of these companies do some kind of checkbox the 13 year old checks that confirms that if they are under 13 their parents have approved. The idea this is "parental rights" has to be a sick sick joke.

NONE of these companies send anyone anywhere to actually check that the parents OK'ed going on omegle etc.

Tweak the law so that the companies have to actually verify parental approval. Ie, something in person with parent and the kid. And that parents then are the admins on the account and get both see all activity and also control minutes / week of activity on the platform.

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.

Pornhub doesn't have a part of the website for minor teenagers or Minecraft. Neopets doesn't have a porn or gore section. Even 4chan separates their SFW and NSFW boards onto different sites (though obviously even their SFW boards are not child friendly and don't pretend to be).

You can't do anything at the DNS level for reddit (short of blocking it all) because it's all one site. And it uses TLS, so you'd need to MITM to do partial filtering, which is beyond the capability of most people. I assume Instagram and tiktok are similar/even harder to filter.

Porn sites at least used to ask for credit cards. Now they just ask yes/no are you 18, and they have children's sections. They should really be working to clean up their act in a privacy/autonomy friendly way (e.g. through labeling and partnering with browsers) before they're forced into these kinds of laws. Or stop targeting children as a market and ban anyone that hints that they are under 18.