As I'm sure anyone with even an inkling of what current affairs even are now knows, a subject that has seen major attention in the last few months has been a number of teenage suicides as a result of anonymous abuse on the website Ask.fm. Like an agitated flock of geese, the issue has been a flying frenzy of noise and hysteria, nesting in every news outlet you can shake a wholewheat, goose-nibbled roll of half-assed simile at.
For the few who are not aware, Ask.fm is a social networking site in which users can ask or be asked questions about themselves and display their answers on their profile page. Users do not have to answer every question, and can choose if they want to be anonymous or not, or even if they want to see anonymous questions at all.
Following the suicide of fifteen year-old Ciara Pugsley as a result of being bullied on Ask.fm last year, another case has arisen within the last few days, being the suicide of fourteen-year old Hannah Smith. In each case, a teenage girl was subjected to particularly cruel bullying by anonymous users on Ask.fm and subsequently committed suicide. There have been three others, but as these have been the most high-profile cases, I shall focus on them. Media outlets have jumped on the issue by denouncing Ask.fm in droves and demanding that the site be shut down, with countless members of the public following suit. Most of these vitriolic, knee-jerk reactions are of course being propagated by tabloid publications such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, but today David Cameron announced that he too shared these sentiments and encouraged people to boycott Ask.fm. Such is the prevalence of this attitude, that most seem content to actually lay the blame of these girls' suicides on the owners of Ask.fm themselves. Such ludicrous opinions range from "they should be ashamed" to the nonsensical heights of "they killed these girls".
As is always the case with sensationalist tabloid campaigns, there is a fundamental lack of common sense, human decency and perhaps most importantly, facts. Of course it is true that these girls committed suicide as a result of bullying on Ask.fm, no one is denying that, nor is the tragedy of these events in question in any respect. What is true is that Ask.fm hosts over 65 million users worldwide, and that the vast majority of its users use the site for nothing more than fun, social interaction. The number of suicides attributed anonymous bullying on Ask.fm is 5. To put this into perspective, the United Kingdom has a comparative population of 63 million. In 2011, some 6,045 people committed suicide in the United Kingdom. That is 1,209 times higher than the suicides attributed to Ask.fm. I am in no way attempting to downplay the seriousness of the 5 suicides in question, but to attribute their causes to Ask.fm itself is a ludicrous leap of logic. The problem here is not online anonymity in itself, the problem is bullying, online anonymity being one of many outlets for the perpetrators. There have been plenty of people who have committed suicide over bullying on Facebook (like nineteen year-old Andrew Cain), but nobody seems to give two shits about that, probably because everyone is on Facebook and wouldn't want such a convenience removed from them.
There are those who then say that while the owners of Ask.fm should not be personally held accountable, they are to blame for refusing to introduce more robust security features and reforms to prevent future cyber-bullying despite the appeals of the people. This is not true either, as basic knowledge of the workings of the site will tell you that there is ‘in-question’ reporting function, which has been in place since 2012, that allows users to report objectionable questions, a 24-hour team of human moderators whose job it is to respond and act upon reported objectionable content, the fact that IP addresses can be used to determine a user's indentity, and most basically, users can choose whether or not to allow anonymous questions to even be seen. All of this and more is spelled out very clearly by Mark and Ilja Terebin, co-founders of the site in an open letter addressing the issue (ironically, the Daily Mirror was the only site to display the full letter without cherry-picking), and the company is currently assisting police in the investigation of Hannah Smith's suicide. From all of this, it can be seen that the accusation that Ask.fm is doing nothing to rectify the issue is also objectively baseless and incorrect.
Fundamentally, Ask.fm was created as creative social website for people to quiz one another anonymously if they so pleased, and of the millions of people who frequent the site, a very small fraction of them have very unfortunately decided to abuse the system provided for them in order to harm others. These people were bullies to begin with, let us not forget that. Mere access to Ask.fm did not spontaneously transform an innocent group of young people into seething fountains of hate and vitriol. Bullying is an age-old problem, and one that has roots in the very foundations of our society, in our social expectations, our judgement of others, our apathy, and not to mention how each individual child is raised by their individual surroundings. It is a complex issue with no simple solution, and scapegoating the creators of one particular website in which such a far-reaching issue has occurred is a pointless and time-wasting endeavour.
I implore people to focus their time and effort not on the false, cover-all solutions that the uncaring and manipulative media propagates, but on discovering and understanding the roots of bullying itself and working together towards solutions that will eradicate the terrorizing of vulnerable people as much as is possible. Don't let those small few limit our freedom of speech, let us instead pinpoint the real offenders and make things better for those who wish no harm.
As is always the case with sensationalist tabloid campaigns, there is a fundamental lack of common sense, human decency and perhaps most importantly, facts. Of course it is true that these girls committed suicide as a result of bullying on Ask.fm, no one is denying that, nor is the tragedy of these events in question in any respect. What is true is that Ask.fm hosts over 65 million users worldwide, and that the vast majority of its users use the site for nothing more than fun, social interaction. The number of suicides attributed anonymous bullying on Ask.fm is 5. To put this into perspective, the United Kingdom has a comparative population of 63 million. In 2011, some 6,045 people committed suicide in the United Kingdom. That is 1,209 times higher than the suicides attributed to Ask.fm. I am in no way attempting to downplay the seriousness of the 5 suicides in question, but to attribute their causes to Ask.fm itself is a ludicrous leap of logic. The problem here is not online anonymity in itself, the problem is bullying, online anonymity being one of many outlets for the perpetrators. There have been plenty of people who have committed suicide over bullying on Facebook (like nineteen year-old Andrew Cain), but nobody seems to give two shits about that, probably because everyone is on Facebook and wouldn't want such a convenience removed from them.
There are those who then say that while the owners of Ask.fm should not be personally held accountable, they are to blame for refusing to introduce more robust security features and reforms to prevent future cyber-bullying despite the appeals of the people. This is not true either, as basic knowledge of the workings of the site will tell you that there is ‘in-question’ reporting function, which has been in place since 2012, that allows users to report objectionable questions, a 24-hour team of human moderators whose job it is to respond and act upon reported objectionable content, the fact that IP addresses can be used to determine a user's indentity, and most basically, users can choose whether or not to allow anonymous questions to even be seen. All of this and more is spelled out very clearly by Mark and Ilja Terebin, co-founders of the site in an open letter addressing the issue (ironically, the Daily Mirror was the only site to display the full letter without cherry-picking), and the company is currently assisting police in the investigation of Hannah Smith's suicide. From all of this, it can be seen that the accusation that Ask.fm is doing nothing to rectify the issue is also objectively baseless and incorrect.
Fundamentally, Ask.fm was created as creative social website for people to quiz one another anonymously if they so pleased, and of the millions of people who frequent the site, a very small fraction of them have very unfortunately decided to abuse the system provided for them in order to harm others. These people were bullies to begin with, let us not forget that. Mere access to Ask.fm did not spontaneously transform an innocent group of young people into seething fountains of hate and vitriol. Bullying is an age-old problem, and one that has roots in the very foundations of our society, in our social expectations, our judgement of others, our apathy, and not to mention how each individual child is raised by their individual surroundings. It is a complex issue with no simple solution, and scapegoating the creators of one particular website in which such a far-reaching issue has occurred is a pointless and time-wasting endeavour.
I implore people to focus their time and effort not on the false, cover-all solutions that the uncaring and manipulative media propagates, but on discovering and understanding the roots of bullying itself and working together towards solutions that will eradicate the terrorizing of vulnerable people as much as is possible. Don't let those small few limit our freedom of speech, let us instead pinpoint the real offenders and make things better for those who wish no harm.
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