Online safety experts have warned parents to be vigilant about teenagers’ use of anonymous feedback apps that allow users to leave unnamed comments about others, amid new concerns over cyberbullying.
As policymakers analyse the roots of teenage depression, in response to research published last week indicating that 24% of 14-year-old girls and 9% of boys are depressed, the role of social media has come under scrutiny, particularly the soaring popularity of “honesty” sites.
“This is an area of concern for us. Kids are telling us these sites can facilitate bullying,” said Sonja Jutte, from the NSPCC’s child safety online team. “We can’t say increased social media use is causing higher depression or mental health issues in teenage girls, but it is contributing to the pressures that young people are facing.”
A recent Netaware study found that the opportunity to be anonymous on some platforms was facilitating bullying behaviour. Will Gardner, the chief executive of the children’s charity Childnet, which works to make the internet safer for younger users, said parents needed to discuss these sites with their children to help equip them to deal with potential bullying. “People are generally nastier on anonymised sites,” he said.
While anonymous comment boards have been popular for years, honest feedback sites are a relatively new manifestation, and are increasingly the subject of calls to the UK Safer Internet Centre helpline from teachers and other professionals working with children.
One of the newest and most popular apps is Sarahah, which launched this year, inviting users to “improve your friendship by discovering your strengths and areas for improvement; let your friends be honest with you”. Created by the computer scientist Zainalabdin Tawfiq, based in Saudi Arabia, as a tool to allow employees to give anonymous feedback to bosses and colleagues, it has rapidly become popular with teenagers around the world. The site already has 90 million registered users, according to Tawfiq, and was one of the most downloaded iPhone apps in the UK and the US in August.
The parenting website Commonsense Media notes in an online video that the site makes it “super easy for kids to cyberbully without repercussions”, and concludes: “Clearly there’s not much to love here so we don’t recommend that teens use Sararah.”
While teenagers sign up to apps such as Sarahah in the hope of hearing positive feedback, many discover that the tone can quickly become critical, with comments more along the lines of “no one likes you”, “why are you so vain?”. This month a girls’ school in Dublin wrote to parents requesting that they make sure their daughters delete the app from their smartphones “for the wellbeing of all the students”.
Similar sites have had bursts of popularity in the past. Ask.fm, which also allows anonymous posting, was associated with online bullying. Sayat.me, another “anonymous feedback tool”, briefly went viral in the UK this year before being linked to the death of George Hessay, a 15-year-old from Goole in east Yorkshire who killed himself. It was subsequently taken offline.
Tawfiq said he wanted to avoid problems experienced by other sites by trying to create a positive environment. “Whenever you try to send a user a message, you see a fixed text that says: ‘Leave a constructive message :)’ – that’s a preventative measure,” he said. Developers had created blocking and filtering techniques to remove abuse, he said, as well as reporting mechanisms.
He would not reveal how many moderators the company employed or where they were based.
Tawfiq had not anticipated the site would become so popular with teenagers. The app is classified as 17-plus, and users must be over that age to download it from Apple. However, this requirement is easy to circumvent and the site has no age verification mechanism.
“We are concerned about any misuse of the site. We can disable accounts. We update the filters regularly. We are eagerly working on this,” he said. “Unfortunately this is an issue that all social networks face. Even before social networks people tended to do similar things – you can always create an anonymous email. We are trying to make the filters much more intelligent to detect any violations.
“We have to prevent bullying as much as possible. It is at the top of our list; it is something of concern to us. We would not be happy to hear that a user got affected,” Tawfiq said.
Because apps become popular so rapidly, developers often struggle to employ enough moderators to keep up with the soaring number of users, said Laura Higgins, the manager of the UK Safer Internet Centre site. She said that while developers needed to include safety features in app designs, young people also had a responsibility not to hide behind anonymity to be abusive towards each other.
“So many of these sites are cropping up so quickly that it is hard to say one is more risky than another,” she said.
Gardner said there was a parallel positive function for anonymous zones online, allowing people to seek advice on sensitive or embarrassing subjects. But he said there was a particular brutality associated with the use of apps that encourage people to be honest anonymously.
“Parents should know these sites exist, and have conversations about them with their children,” said Gardner. “They should ask questions about their online life, just as they would about their offline life; be interested and get them to show the apps.”
