RIP Omegle: The Demise of the Online Chat Service

Photo Credit: Omegle

The online video chat service Omegle was shut down on Nov. 9. This followed the settlement of a 2021 lawsuit regarding the sexual abuse of minors on the platform, which was originally created in 2009 by then 18-year-old Leif K-Brooks. The Omegle website now shows K-Brooks’ lengthy statement regarding the service’s closure, and the video chat functions are no longer available.

According to the Omegle website, the platform was originally created to connect users randomly to “Talk to Strangers” as its tagline states, and to introduce “a form of social spontaneity that [K-Brooks] felt didn’t exist elsewhere.”

The platform has been popular since its release, gaining millions of daily users and over 70 million visits a month. On top of its popularity, many content creators share recordings of chats from Omegle on YouTube, Tiktok, and other social media platforms.

For a long time, Omegle has been accused of giving opportunities for sexual predators, especially because of the platform’s more young and vulnerable users. According to the BBC, Omegle has been mentioned in over 50 cases against pedophiles in the last two years.

In his statement announcing the closure of Omegle, K-Brooks said, “I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said ‘no’ to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse.” 

The statement included that the internet was a “magical,” safe space for him when Omegle was first created, for “it was the idea of ‘meeting new people’ distilled down to almost its platonic ideal”, but the misuse has gotten out of hand, resulting in the site’s shutdown.

The popular video chat platform closed just a week after settling a prominent lawsuit with a person identifying as A.M., who accused the platform of connecting her in 2014 at the age of 11 with sexual predator Ryan Scott Fordyce who was in his late 30s at the time. Fordyce was sentenced to prison in Canada for exploiting A.M. and other girls after police found thousands of illegal photos and videos on his devices in his home in 2018.

The first time A.M. and Fordyce paired on Omegle, they exchanged text messages on the platform. After a while, they started connecting on outside platforms, and according to the lawsuit, he “forced A.M. to take and send naked photos and videos of herself engaging in sex acts of his choosing” for the next couple of years. A.M. claimed that Fordyce threatened to release pictures of her and bring about her arrest, as well as pressuring her to recruit other underage girls on Omegle. Their interactions lasted for four years, until A.M. was 15.

In 2021, A.M. sued for $22 million in damages for the platform’s ignorance of their users’ sexual abuse, accusing Omegle of causing A.M. to be sex trafficked and profiting from the crime.

The lawsuit critiqued the design of the platform, explaining that though there were warnings on the website saying one must be 18+ or 13+ with parental consent and supervision to use the chat service, the platform did not require users to prove their birthdate or parental consent.

The lawsuit states that the website was supposed to protect children and anonymity, to which Omegle responded that A.M. voluntarily gave away her contact information and that the abuse happened mainly on outside apps. Both sides eventually agreed to settle the case, so Judge Michael W. Mosman dismissed the case in federal district court in Oregon.

K-Brooks went on to add in his statement that “Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong.”

Due to the website’s promise of anonymity — a key feature in its success — it was ultimately unable to protect its youngest users. 

“The only way to please [the people criticizing the platform] is to stop offering the service,” said K-Brooks in his statement. He described analogies like shutting down Central Park because crimes are committed there, or destroying the universe because it contains evil. 

“I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist,” he said. “Unfortunately, what is right doesn’t always prevail.”

To close off his statement, he said, “From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.”