The crux of it comes down to random matchings of stream users, no screenings or age verifications for minors, despite the service owner Leif Brooks being well aware that the service is used by minors in significant numbers since probably a decade at this point. And he refused accountability or putting in systems that would prevent minor abuse of this kind, even though the service had no encryption and was public.
So because minors can use the service, it’s a pedophile service? Is the internet a pedophile service too? There isn’t any age requirement or verification to use it. Should it be shut down as well?
I don’t see why a website should be required to make sure their users follow the law.
So because minors can use the service, it’s a pedophile service? Is the internet a pedophile service too?
Minors have used Omegle for only one purpose. Can you tell me where are all the college lectures, nursery videos, art and craft videos, funny videos or other types of safe content regarding children on Omegle? You are intentionally distorting the argument to make Omegle look like some innocent service. It solely has had sexual minor content for a decade at this point, besides other innuendo videos such as the ones you see on paid OnlyFans profiles (uncensored digital prostitution, solo sex et al).
Minors using the internet services does not make it pedophilic. Minors can use most of the internet safely. If you make another deranged argument like that, you will get the banhammer. Talk sensibly, I do not like using mod powers.
I beg to differ. Minors can’t safely use the internet at all, it’s the internet. Every depth of the human psyche is mirrored onto it, and frankly any guardian letting a child onto it without at the minimum strong primers on its dangers is derilict of their duty. Which might have been excusable 20-30 years ago when everybody was confused about what the internet even is, but not so much in 2023.
If you make another deranged argument like that, you will get the banhammer.
Just for clarity, I’m not the person you said this to, but I think if you are out here threatening people with bans over a rhetorical question, you might want to take a break. Nevermind the disconnect between you saying you haven’t used it at all but purpoting to know exactly what kind of “content” was on it these last years, when it didn’t even really have content in the usual sense of the word.
Minors can and have used more or less most of the internet safely. What is most of the internet? Services like Omegle or Chaturbate or Stripchat surely are not on it. Minors have used social media all this while, and other than what Facebook/Instagram on behest of US capitalist machinery has done to minors,
, most services do not abuse human psychology to this degree. However, children’s minds are highly neuroplastic until adulthood, and a lot of the internet is damaging to the psyche of children, which is an entirely different discussion. If that seems like flipflopping, it is because internet safety has various degrees to it and the definition of safety varies from healthy usage to consumerism to addiction to gray area to developing deviant persona and even illegal uses.
It is fairly known how peer pressure wins over parental control on minor access to internet, so the “parent’s duty” argument is very flaky and invalid. Education on things rest of the society is freely using is not very conducive to children at the age of puberty (12-16), and 18 is supposedly the adult age. So is the argument now going to be letting kids do whatever they want by the time they are 18? Or will this be decided upon a combination of evaluation of mental age using tests related to Asperger’s, neurodivergence, ADHD and so on? How frequently will these tests be taken by kids? Will there be exposure of the child to concepts like “absolute American freedom” and various forms of consumerism? Because that is what the child will get exposed to, as soon as he/she meets people outside home, or goes to the market with parents.
if you are out here threatening people with bans over a rhetorical question
The reason I did not is because I see the blurred line between rhetoric and “slippery slope” argument that usually follows such rhetoric questions. Their argument comes off as distasteful, even though a whole decade of video streaming exists as proof of Omegle being a key mainstream hub for minor sexual abuse content, with no kinds of methods used by the evasive service owner to combat it. Read the link I supplied in above comments regarding that.
I know the types of content there not because I frequented that shithole of a service, but because vigilantes and watchdogs tend to investigate services in limit and for analysis to warn the society about it. Would you also label academic researchers of CSAM as seeking pedophile content? (Rhetoric that I will end in next sentence) If no, that is because it is easy to see the difference with a little common sense between one “researching” for the “sauce” and one researching to understand how the whole mechanism of service works to warn society about the type of content there exists. You should be able to see clearly that I am quite interested in such discussions without the moderator part.
Minors can and have used more or less most of the internet safely. What is most of the internet? Services like Omegle or Chaturbate or Stripchat surely are not on it.
Well that claim is a bit arbitrary IMHO. For one I don’t see a reason to exclude those services you mentioned from being part of “most of the internet”. On the contrary, from what I see all of them are clearnet services, accessible to the public, so this extraordinary claim would need some evidence toward it I would say. Secondly the latter two are explicitly pornographic in nature, so I don’t really see the relevance towards the point of children being harmed by accessing them; They shouldn’t be there in the first place. There is of course a valid discussion about moderation to be had if they are used to distribute CSAM, but that seems orthogonal to the question of parental oversight of minors internet use.
Minors have used social media all this while, and other than what Facebook/Instagram on behest of US capitalist machinery has done to minors, […] most services do not abuse human psychology to this degree.
Again, only according to your arbitrary definition of what “most services” are. Basically all of social media is doing attention hacking, large swaths of of the gaming industry intentionally abuse dopamine cycles to sell worthless “digital goods”, the www is full of dark patterns in large part fuelled by advertisement delivery. I mean Meta is indubitably a front runner in the race of surveillance capitalism, but isn’t that an argument in favour of Omegle in the context of this discussion? Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are much more certainly than Omegle a part of “most of the internet” after all, however you define that, and they are a clear and present danger to children.
However, children’s minds are highly neuroplastic until adulthood, and a lot of the internet is damaging to the psyche of children, which is an entirely different discussion. If that seems like flipflopping, it is because internet safety has various degrees to it and the definition of safety varies from healthy usage to consumerism to addiction to gray area to developing deviant persona and even illegal uses.
I don’t think it is a different discussion at all, rather it’s exactly the crux of the issue. The psyche of children is vulnerable; How do we best protect it and who is in the best position to effectively do so?
It is fairly known how peer pressure wins over parental control on minor access to internet, so the “parent’s duty” argument is very flaky and invalid. Education on things rest of the society is freely using is not very conducive to children at the age of puberty (12-16), and 18 is supposedly the adult age.
It might not be a definitive argument, but certainly not invalid. A parent is chiefly responsible for the safety, education, and behaviour of their children in basically all other areas of life. This responsibility doesn’t go away because the neighbours kids peer pressured them into throwing stones through a window or drinking alcohol. Why should access to the internet be any different?
So is the argument now going to be letting kids do whatever they want by the time they are 18?
Well yes, but within the confines of legality obviously. That’s literally the status quo in most jurisdictions, isn’t it?!
Or will this be decided upon a combination of evaluation of mental age using tests related to Asperger’s, neurodivergence, ADHD and so on? How frequently will these tests be taken by kids?
Gee I hope not. That sounds like the abyss below the slippery slope. But I don’t think anybody argued for that.
Will there be exposure of the child to concepts like “absolute American freedom” and various forms of consumerism? Because that is what the child will get exposed to, as soon as he/she meets people outside home, or goes to the market with parents.
Again, I don’t see the relevance to the Omegle situation. This is just life, the world is a dangerous place and while society can help by creating laws and such in the end the ones in the best position to safeguard their children according to their own world view will be the parents. Of course that is a duty in which every individual parent will inevitably fail by some metric, but so will society. Case in point, many children will be exposed to “absolute American freedom and various forms of consumerism” inside their own homes already, so if that’s your metric as a parent the only one who could ever protect a child from that is you, by preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with those concepts and hoping they take that lesson to heart.
Their argument comes off as distasteful, even though a whole decade of video streaming exists as proof of Omegle being a key mainstream hub for minor sexual abuse content, with no kinds of methods used by the evasive service owner to combat it. Read the link I supplied in above comments regarding that.
Yeah you claimed variously that it is a key part of Omegle “content”, for which I don’t see much corroborating evidence in the links you provided. Both the BBC story and the NCOSE piece seem to reference the same case of an 11 year old girl using the service unsupervised.
Which leads me to why I’m taking issue with the statement of Omegle having content. It doesn’t in the sense most people would understand that. It revolves around having a conversation with an absolute stranger, and either side of this conversation can record it or publish it. There is no content here unless one participant creates it and distributes it elsewhere than Omegle, or takes other content and distributes it on Omegle. Everything on Omegle is content in the same sense as a phone call is content, to which I would argue it isn’t, at least not inherently. It’s an ephemeral conversation unless a participant records it.
It might be content in the sense argued by the law and the court in the “A.M Vs Omegle” case, but that apparently ended in the motion to dismiss being partly granted and partly denied, which to me as a layperson sounds like a win for Omegle, at least temporarily.
Furthermore you say Omegle and Brooks didn’t do anything against the abuse, but this is in direct contradiction to what Brooks claims in the message in the OP:
Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. 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.
And this is all besides the point that giving an 11 year old unsupervised access to Omegle is kind of the same as letting them out into the shady part of town to talk to random strangers (when you ignore the added risk of physical harm there of course). That’s what the website was principally about, meeting random strangers. And if a parent were to let their child do that unsupervised in offline life we would put at least part of the blame for any harm on them.
The internet wasn’t designed with the safety of children in mind, in fact not with anybodies safety in mind. Saying that it should be is an opinion, but in any case not the current reality. That leaves the majority of responsibility for the safety of children on the parents. And there is a bunch of things they can do, like not giving them networked devices in the first place, or restricting network access with whitelists, or educating them before the parents or others do give access. Yes, this parental control breaks down in social settings, but that is the case for a lot of different aspects of life and I don’t see how purging everything dangerous for children from the public internet is either a possible or even a desirable solution to this problem.
Take for example what you and the NCOSE argued for, age verification. The state of the art for that on many explicitly pornographic services is a simple dialogue asking if the user is of legal age in their jurisdiction. The infrastructure to do otherwise, which would require a governmentally issued digital ID of some kind, doesn’t exist in most countries let alone globally. Never mind the implications this would have for user privacy. Some services use a certain identifier so that their service can be automatically filtered, but that again leaves the parents with the responsibility to set up and maintain said filter. And in the end there will not be a way around that at all, unless you purposely rebuild the internet with a level of control it simply is not engineered to provide currently.
You should be able to see clearly that I am quite interested in such discussions without the moderator part.
Well the one who brought that into the discussion was you. Not to diminish your efforts, but I stand by what I said on the matter earlier.
That sounds extremely ignorant, considering how well known this stuff should be publicly. This might help a bit. https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/omegle-needs-accountability-for-facilitating-the-exploitation-of-children/
This is a large story of a minor exploited. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
The crux of it comes down to random matchings of stream users, no screenings or age verifications for minors, despite the service owner Leif Brooks being well aware that the service is used by minors in significant numbers since probably a decade at this point. And he refused accountability or putting in systems that would prevent minor abuse of this kind, even though the service had no encryption and was public.
So because minors can use the service, it’s a pedophile service? Is the internet a pedophile service too? There isn’t any age requirement or verification to use it. Should it be shut down as well?
I don’t see why a website should be required to make sure their users follow the law.
Minors have used Omegle for only one purpose. Can you tell me where are all the college lectures, nursery videos, art and craft videos, funny videos or other types of safe content regarding children on Omegle? You are intentionally distorting the argument to make Omegle look like some innocent service. It solely has had sexual minor content for a decade at this point, besides other innuendo videos such as the ones you see on paid OnlyFans profiles (uncensored digital prostitution, solo sex et al).
Minors using the internet services does not make it pedophilic. Minors can use most of the internet safely. If you make another deranged argument like that, you will get the banhammer. Talk sensibly, I do not like using mod powers.
I beg to differ. Minors can’t safely use the internet at all, it’s the internet. Every depth of the human psyche is mirrored onto it, and frankly any guardian letting a child onto it without at the minimum strong primers on its dangers is derilict of their duty. Which might have been excusable 20-30 years ago when everybody was confused about what the internet even is, but not so much in 2023.
Just for clarity, I’m not the person you said this to, but I think if you are out here threatening people with bans over a rhetorical question, you might want to take a break. Nevermind the disconnect between you saying you haven’t used it at all but purpoting to know exactly what kind of “content” was on it these last years, when it didn’t even really have content in the usual sense of the word.
Minors can and have used more or less most of the internet safely. What is most of the internet? Services like Omegle or Chaturbate or Stripchat surely are not on it. Minors have used social media all this while, and other than what Facebook/Instagram on behest of US capitalist machinery has done to minors,
, most services do not abuse human psychology to this degree. However, children’s minds are highly neuroplastic until adulthood, and a lot of the internet is damaging to the psyche of children, which is an entirely different discussion. If that seems like flipflopping, it is because internet safety has various degrees to it and the definition of safety varies from healthy usage to consumerism to addiction to gray area to developing deviant persona and even illegal uses.
It is fairly known how peer pressure wins over parental control on minor access to internet, so the “parent’s duty” argument is very flaky and invalid. Education on things rest of the society is freely using is not very conducive to children at the age of puberty (12-16), and 18 is supposedly the adult age. So is the argument now going to be letting kids do whatever they want by the time they are 18? Or will this be decided upon a combination of evaluation of mental age using tests related to Asperger’s, neurodivergence, ADHD and so on? How frequently will these tests be taken by kids? Will there be exposure of the child to concepts like “absolute American freedom” and various forms of consumerism? Because that is what the child will get exposed to, as soon as he/she meets people outside home, or goes to the market with parents.
The reason I did not is because I see the blurred line between rhetoric and “slippery slope” argument that usually follows such rhetoric questions. Their argument comes off as distasteful, even though a whole decade of video streaming exists as proof of Omegle being a key mainstream hub for minor sexual abuse content, with no kinds of methods used by the evasive service owner to combat it. Read the link I supplied in above comments regarding that.
I know the types of content there not because I frequented that shithole of a service, but because vigilantes and watchdogs tend to investigate services in limit and for analysis to warn the society about it. Would you also label academic researchers of CSAM as seeking pedophile content? (Rhetoric that I will end in next sentence) If no, that is because it is easy to see the difference with a little common sense between one “researching” for the “sauce” and one researching to understand how the whole mechanism of service works to warn society about the type of content there exists. You should be able to see clearly that I am quite interested in such discussions without the moderator part.
Well that claim is a bit arbitrary IMHO. For one I don’t see a reason to exclude those services you mentioned from being part of “most of the internet”. On the contrary, from what I see all of them are clearnet services, accessible to the public, so this extraordinary claim would need some evidence toward it I would say. Secondly the latter two are explicitly pornographic in nature, so I don’t really see the relevance towards the point of children being harmed by accessing them; They shouldn’t be there in the first place. There is of course a valid discussion about moderation to be had if they are used to distribute CSAM, but that seems orthogonal to the question of parental oversight of minors internet use.
Again, only according to your arbitrary definition of what “most services” are. Basically all of social media is doing attention hacking, large swaths of of the gaming industry intentionally abuse dopamine cycles to sell worthless “digital goods”, the www is full of dark patterns in large part fuelled by advertisement delivery. I mean Meta is indubitably a front runner in the race of surveillance capitalism, but isn’t that an argument in favour of Omegle in the context of this discussion? Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are much more certainly than Omegle a part of “most of the internet” after all, however you define that, and they are a clear and present danger to children.
I don’t think it is a different discussion at all, rather it’s exactly the crux of the issue. The psyche of children is vulnerable; How do we best protect it and who is in the best position to effectively do so?
It might not be a definitive argument, but certainly not invalid. A parent is chiefly responsible for the safety, education, and behaviour of their children in basically all other areas of life. This responsibility doesn’t go away because the neighbours kids peer pressured them into throwing stones through a window or drinking alcohol. Why should access to the internet be any different?
Well yes, but within the confines of legality obviously. That’s literally the status quo in most jurisdictions, isn’t it?!
Gee I hope not. That sounds like the abyss below the slippery slope. But I don’t think anybody argued for that.
Again, I don’t see the relevance to the Omegle situation. This is just life, the world is a dangerous place and while society can help by creating laws and such in the end the ones in the best position to safeguard their children according to their own world view will be the parents. Of course that is a duty in which every individual parent will inevitably fail by some metric, but so will society. Case in point, many children will be exposed to “absolute American freedom and various forms of consumerism” inside their own homes already, so if that’s your metric as a parent the only one who could ever protect a child from that is you, by preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with those concepts and hoping they take that lesson to heart.
Yeah you claimed variously that it is a key part of Omegle “content”, for which I don’t see much corroborating evidence in the links you provided. Both the BBC story and the NCOSE piece seem to reference the same case of an 11 year old girl using the service unsupervised.
Which leads me to why I’m taking issue with the statement of Omegle having content. It doesn’t in the sense most people would understand that. It revolves around having a conversation with an absolute stranger, and either side of this conversation can record it or publish it. There is no content here unless one participant creates it and distributes it elsewhere than Omegle, or takes other content and distributes it on Omegle. Everything on Omegle is content in the same sense as a phone call is content, to which I would argue it isn’t, at least not inherently. It’s an ephemeral conversation unless a participant records it.
It might be content in the sense argued by the law and the court in the “A.M Vs Omegle” case, but that apparently ended in the motion to dismiss being partly granted and partly denied, which to me as a layperson sounds like a win for Omegle, at least temporarily.
Furthermore you say Omegle and Brooks didn’t do anything against the abuse, but this is in direct contradiction to what Brooks claims in the message in the OP:
And this is all besides the point that giving an 11 year old unsupervised access to Omegle is kind of the same as letting them out into the shady part of town to talk to random strangers (when you ignore the added risk of physical harm there of course). That’s what the website was principally about, meeting random strangers. And if a parent were to let their child do that unsupervised in offline life we would put at least part of the blame for any harm on them.
The internet wasn’t designed with the safety of children in mind, in fact not with anybodies safety in mind. Saying that it should be is an opinion, but in any case not the current reality. That leaves the majority of responsibility for the safety of children on the parents. And there is a bunch of things they can do, like not giving them networked devices in the first place, or restricting network access with whitelists, or educating them before the parents or others do give access. Yes, this parental control breaks down in social settings, but that is the case for a lot of different aspects of life and I don’t see how purging everything dangerous for children from the public internet is either a possible or even a desirable solution to this problem.
Take for example what you and the NCOSE argued for, age verification. The state of the art for that on many explicitly pornographic services is a simple dialogue asking if the user is of legal age in their jurisdiction. The infrastructure to do otherwise, which would require a governmentally issued digital ID of some kind, doesn’t exist in most countries let alone globally. Never mind the implications this would have for user privacy. Some services use a certain identifier so that their service can be automatically filtered, but that again leaves the parents with the responsibility to set up and maintain said filter. And in the end there will not be a way around that at all, unless you purposely rebuild the internet with a level of control it simply is not engineered to provide currently.
Well the one who brought that into the discussion was you. Not to diminish your efforts, but I stand by what I said on the matter earlier.
Are you sure it isn’t you using it for just one purpose??
What is with the ad hominem style accusations? Are you an aficionado of that platform? I have never opened it to play any kind of content in my life.