Today I want to talk about my last discovery in social networking, Ask.fm.
Despite its name, Ask.fm is not a radio station. Ask.fm is nothing but one more social platform succeeding among teenagers and based upon asking and answering. That simple. A Q&A website. Nothing more and nothing less, or… is there anything more hidden behind such an innocent approach?
First of all, here go some numbers to put you into context. As of today:
- 50 million people use it.
- 1.1 million Likes in Facebook.
Not bad for a company founded in Latvia 3 years ago… Let’s see how it works.
You register and join. False name, false identity or simply turn the Anon button ON is part of the game. Of course, you can also use your real profile as most people probably do, but there are also always “those other people”. So now you are ready to search for friends and start asking and answering questions.
Quite silly so far, isn’t it? The point is some people misuse it and lately, there have been suicides among bullied teenagers blamed on Ask.fm. So, bullying is again the bottom line here. Bullied teenagers with low self-esteem who commit suicide. Bullied teenagers who decide to take their lives away because their feelings have been badly hurt by anonymous messages like these:
“Why are you so ugly?”
“Kill yourself. You’re worthless.”
“Can you just kill yourself ?”
Because of those recent suicides there is a faction of people demanding the closure of the site. There is even a Facebook page with more than 10.000 fans entirely dedicated to deleting this website .
And here is where we come to the crux of the matter. Does it make sense to close something because some people use it badly? Isn’t it easier to delete your account and get off the sure if you are being bullied?
Does anyone really believe that people are taking their lives because of Facebook or Ask.fm or any other social network? As we always do in La Piazza, we are not going to position ourselves with any of the above mentioned options. All we say is common sense is the key.
We would love it if you shared with us your opinion about this complicated hot topic.
A. Delete the website and this way avoid all dangers?
B. Or trust people’s common sense and hope they will make an adequate usage of it?
Which is your option? A or B?