I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.

November 9, 2023 3:18 PM

Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks announces that he's shutting the site down, citing attacks on the service "based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users".
posted by hanov3r (24 comments total)

"The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. 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. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online."
posted by clavdivs at 3:25 PM on November 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Omegle was a free, web-based online chat service that allowed users to socialize with others without the need to register. The service randomly paired users in one-on-one chat sessions where they would chat anonymously using the names "You" and "Stranger".

posted by zamboni at 3:31 PM on November 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

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.

Let the record show that "people" are people, too.
posted by aniola at 3:54 PM on November 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

... which isn't to say they didn't do shitty things, but doing shitty things doesn't make you not a person.
posted by aniola at 3:57 PM on November 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit From a Sexual Abuse Survivor

“The permanent shutdown of Omegle was a term negotiated between Omegle and our client in exchange for Omegle getting to avoid the impending jury trial verdict”

posted by Nelson at 3:57 PM on November 9, 2023 [36 favorites]

Thanks for that, Nelson. The shutdown message was very vague about what the “attacks” Omegle had suffered were but seemed to be saying that some people were unhappy with Omegle’s response to criminal acts on the service. I guess that was why the message was so vague, though it’s bullshit that the shutdown message frames it as some kind of principled act.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:10 PM on November 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

What's Harry Mack going to do now?
posted by flod at 4:20 PM on November 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

rip omegle, thoughts and prayers to all the 35 year old men i talked to when i was 14
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:26 PM on November 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

I guess that was why the message was so vague, though it’s bullshit that the shutdown message frames it as some kind of principled act.

It's vague because they didn't want to admit the truth - that in the lawsuit filed by someone harmed through Omegle, the judge ruled that the site's design precluded a Section 230 defense, and thus they were pretty much screwed.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:39 PM on November 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Looking forward to seeing Facebook and Twitter shut down next, for the same reasons.
posted by MrVisible at 5:49 PM on November 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Pure trash of the internet. Byeeeeeeee
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:00 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

to hell with omegle, the eff and sec 230
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 6:06 PM on November 9, 2023

Let the record show that "people" are people, too. -- aniola

And some, I assume, are good people
posted by krisjohn at 6:09 PM on November 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

There is a slippery slope argument, but I think you can distinguish other social media. Omegle was widely known to attract kids—everyone reminiscing about it seems to have used it at a sleepover or on a lonely adolescent afternoon—and also widely known to attract exhibitionists and normalize nudity, so it was just ripe for abuse.

It knowingly let kids into a place where sexualized nudity and masturbation were basically a defining feature of the platform when they were way too young to handle that or legally consent to any part of it, and the abuser in this case took advantage of that by convincing the victim to send nudes, then blackmailing her. It just feels like a very predictable consequence, like having an unfenced construction site next to a high school or handing out free shaving cream to kids on Halloween.

This kind of abuse can happen on other platforms, but there are usually measures to keep kids out of NSFW areas and keep adults out of kids' DMs.
posted by smelendez at 6:32 PM on November 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

@flod
What's Harry Mack going to do now?

He announced he was stopping Omegle bars at ep 100, which just dropped. I wonder if he had advance warning of this or if it's an incredible coincidence...
posted by underwater at 7:25 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thank you to Nelson for the context and the truth, which honestly should be added to the FPP.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 9:13 PM on November 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

That Harry Mack freestyle thing is heaps of fun. Alas. It's 2023.
posted by zenon at 9:18 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I somehow never heard of Omegle, but I gather it was the same format as Chatroulette? I do remember when that appeared. I was working in a newsroom and we decided to give it a spin, a bunch of alt-weekly editors gathered around the one iMac with a functioning camera. First we talked with a nice older woman from Boston, then a teenage boy in LA, and the third person was jerking off. And that was the end of that.

It is baffling to me that Omegle survived 14 years.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 10:43 PM on November 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

I'm amazed Google was able to use Omegle as tech support for so long! Occasionally more awkward than usual, especially when complaining about Reader.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:33 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

What is a Section 230 defense, and why does the site's design preclude it?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:31 AM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's explained in the Wired article I linked about Omegle being shut down because it negligently enabled child sexual abuse.

In the US, social platforms are often protected by Section 230, a broad act that shields them from liability for the content their users post. But the judge in A.M.’s case found last July that Omegle’s design was at fault and it was not protected by Section 230: It could have worked to prevent matches between minors and adults before sexual content was even sent, the judge said.

Section 230 is in general a blanket protection for companies on the Internet hosting user-created content. It allows sites like Metafilter to largely not be legally responsible for the speech of their users. However it's not completely a get-out-of-jail-free card and companies still have some legal obligations to prevent the worst abuses. (Also ethical and moral, but that's outside the law.)
posted by Nelson at 6:58 AM on November 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Basically, Omegle has survived for so long because it's been able to argue that it's legally indemnified from the actions of its users, so even though it was the fifth most reported website to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (and the four ahead of it being Google and the Facebook triad of services), it had been able to shut down lawsuits at an early phase.

Until this case, where the judge ruled that Omegle's design (and more specifically a lack of checks on pairing minors with adults) was at the core of the case against them and as such Section 230 did not apply. With that, Omegle now had to argue the case on the merits, and the fact that K-Brooks took a settlement where one of the terms was "you will shut down Omegle and never restart it" illustrates how badly the case was against them. (It also illustrates why a similar case would not work against other social media platforms, which do have those checks in place.)

And as I've been thinking about it, I've been seeing K-Brooks' screed linked to in the OP to be inherently dishonest. To call a lawsuit filed by victim of sexual exploitation on Omegle "the behavior of a malicious subset of users" betrays a line of thought that users were expected to assume a significant burden of risk - a point that the Wired writer highlights:

“Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility,” Leif K-Brooks, Omegle’s founder, wrote in a note announcing the site’s end. “The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother ‘happy birthday’, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.” K-Brooks’ note did not mention the settlement in his statement, but blamed the closure of Omegle on unspecified “attacks” against communication services.

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.

Being held accountable for your decisions in a court of law is not an "attack".
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:37 AM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Leif K-Brooks wore his libertarian ideals on his sleeve, even going as far as encouraging people to vote for the Libertarian Party on Omegle. He was just another privileged tech guy who thought other people being harmed by his product was a political badge to be proud of. FAFO, Leif.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 11:12 AM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

The same sort of ruling that led to Omegle's shuttering is now getting applied to the big firms:

Tuesday’s ruling states that the First Amendment and Section 230, which says online platforms shouldn’t be treated as the publishers of third-party content, don’t shield Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat from all liability in this case. Judge Gonzalez Rogers notes many of the claims laid out by the plaintiffs don’t “constitute free speech or expression,” as they have to do with alleged “defects” on the platforms themselves. That includes having insufficient parental controls, no “robust” age verification systems, and a difficult account deletion process.

posted by NoxAeternum at 10:54 AM on November 15, 2023