There have been many new social networking sites cropping up over the years and many of them have been very successful. Take blogging platform Glipho for example, the objective of their site is to cater to independent writers and bloggers (like me) and to give them a free space to publish their thoughts. I am a Glipho member and have found it very useful when trying to engage with my readers because there is a very easy comment and sharing system available to use and it allows me to get into discussions with other writers with the same interests as me. The best way to describe Glipho is that it is a playground for writers and that’s why it has been so successful, simply because it has focused on one particular target market and stuck to it plus their niche isn’t very full so they have lots of free space to move and gather users.
However, as with anything amazing there are always those things that are terrible and quite frankly rather pointless. This is where Ask Fm comes into the equation, for those of you that don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, Ask FM is basically a site which allows users to sign up and receive questions from anyone around the world and answer them. This does seem like a good idea on paper and I’m not going to lie to you, it is used by lots of people but for me it’s the fact that the question asker can choose to remain anonymous and doesn’t even have to have an account to do so.
Some of you may be starting to see where this is going, the fact that the question asker can remain anonymous is a perfect opportunity for a cyber bully because they can say whatever they want to whomever they want and can be safe in the knowledge that their identity won’t be discovered by their victim which means they won’t get into any trouble over it. I have a friend who I won’t mention the name of who was told that he is “going to go to hell just like his granddad” and obviously he didn’t have any idea who said it which made it worse for him!
The Ask FM team have been told that their site gets used for cyber bullying and have said that they are trying their best to prevent this from happening but it is very obvious to me that they are not trying hard enough because there have been countless cases of bullying that have started on Ask FM and then sometimes even progressed to physical bullying. This is totally unacceptable and it must be hard for the creators of Ask FM to know that the site that they put a lot of time and effort into is being used for bullying.
I think that the site should just be shut down and then maybe these cowardly cyber bullies would think about what they have done and start trying to find the guts to face their victim face to face and apologise! I know it’s easy for me to sit here and suggest the shutting down of a website that has probably taken a lot of time and money to make successful but if I was in their shoes I would see that shutting down the site is the only way to at least decrease the ever growing use of social media as a weapon in a bullies arsenal.
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