A live chat site that had become a den of pedophiles since the pandemic closed its doors last week. Despite hundreds of thousands of annual reports of sexual abuse against children, it took a civil lawsuit filed by a victim to push Omegle to close, deplores the Canadian Center for Child Protection.
” This is a good thing [que ça ferme]. But what is fundamentally worrying is that a site like this could exist. There was a problem. Everyone knew it and no one did anything,” said the organization’s spokesperson, René Morin.
Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks announced the end of his platform online. “Virtually any tool can be used for good or evil, and this is especially true of communication tools. […] “There cannot be an honest account of Omegle without recognizing that some people have misused it, including to commit unspeakable and heinous crimes,” he admitted in a lengthy message to users.
This announcement came days after the site settled a $22 million civil lawsuit filed in 2021 in Oregon by an American victim. She had fallen into the net of a predator, a man from Manitoba, met on the site in 2014 when she was 11 years old. According to the young woman’s lawyer, Me Carrie Goldberg, the closure of Omegle was part of the terms of the settlement, the details of which are confidential.
Founded in 2009, the platform brought strangers of all ages and from all over the world into contact, randomly and in real time, by video or text messages. Virtually unknown to young people before the pandemic, Omegle saw its popularity skyrocket during containment measures, with popular YouTubers taking the platform by storm and inviting their admirers to join them.
Sexual abuse
The site was also, for several years, but to a greater extent since 2020, a den of exhibitionists and perverts looking for images of naked adolescents. An investigation of The Press1 carried out at the time revealed the extent of the problem. In 2 hours, over 30 conversations, our guinea pig who played a 14-year-old girl was matched with 13 exhibitionists. In addition, six men had wanted to take her to another site such as Instagram or Snapchat to continue the discussion even though she claimed to be a minor, and five had tried to convince her to undress or make sexual gestures.
Since then, the situation has not improved. Just for the year 2022, Omegle itself reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an American organization, more than 608,000 cases of sexual abuse against children on its own platform, or 1,600 reports per day on average .
But that didn’t stop the site from operating freely until last week. And it was not the governments who closed it, emphasizes René Morin.
If the end of Omegle was deplored by many YouTubers who used it wisely, it did not go unnoticed in pedophile circles either.
The Canadian Center for Child Protection intercepted dark web several conversations between predators who regretted its closure and wondered where their new hunting ground would be.
“Nature abhors a vacuum. They will move to another site, or a new platform will emerge. Are there laws to prevent them from existing? No,” said Mr. Morin.
“A step in the right direction”
“There are other sites of the same type, like Chatroulette, which are always accessible,” underlines sexologist Myriam Le Blanc Élie, who takes care of prevention projects at the Marie-Vincent Foundation. However, she believes that the end of Omegle is “a step in the right direction”. “It was a place where there were no controls and few security measures,” she says.
The sexologist advises parents of adolescents to be interested in what they do online in the same way that they are interested in what they do offline (their extracurricular activities, their hobbies, etc.).
The idea being to maintain the dialogue on technologies and their challenges, underlines Mme White Elijah. “It must be recognized that this type of chat site creates an unsafe context, favorable to negative experiences, since they are very popular and there are few security mechanisms,” she explains.
However, we should not demonize everything, she adds. By chatting with your teenager, you can also recognize the positive sides of this type of site where you can make connections with other people around the world, learn a language or promote a cause, for example, adds Mme White Elijah.
For more information or For ask of ugly
The Parents Line: 1 800 361-5085