Omegle, a website that connected strangers for video chats, has shut down after a lawsuit accused it of facilitating child abuse.
Founder Leif K-Brooks announced the closure Wednesday in a lengthy statement posted to the website that touched on what he saw as positives about the platform and the future of the internet. He wrote that Omegle had been used “to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation.”
But he also noted the platform’s struggles with child predators.
“There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes,” K-Brooks wrote.
Launched in 2009, the website initially gained traction with teens but remained a relatively fringe video-chatting platform, though clips of funny or strange interactions and pairings sometimes spread across the internet. Its cultural resonance ebbed and flowed, with a new burst of popularity on TikTok and YouTube in 2020.
Not long after its launch, Omegle gained a reputation as a platform that struggled to stop child sexual abuse. Omegle has been named in numerous Department of Justice publications announcing the sentencing of people convicted of sex crimes.
The website was sued in 2021 for allegedly having a “defectively designed product” and enabling sex trafficking after the service matched a girl, then 11, with a man who later sexually abused her.
Carrie Goldberg, whose firm represents the girl, said Omegle’s shutdown was a result of mediation between the platform and her client.
Read Related Also: Jewish man dies after confrontation during pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations
K-Brooks wrote that Omegle had “state-of-the-art AI” and a team of moderators working behind-the-scenes to combat misuse of the platform. He also wrote that the site “worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong.”
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) collects reports of suspected child sexual abuse material from tech platforms.
Child sexual abuse and the online sharing of child sexual abuse material has become a sweeping issue that has affected nearly every social media platform. In 2022, Omegle filed over 608,000 reports to NCMEC, while Instagram submitted more than 5 million and Facebook submitted over 21 million.
In his statement, K-Brooks said that a war was being waged “against the Internet” under the banner of child safety.
“Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere,” he wrote.
The website had declined in relevance amid the rise of other chat platforms like Discord but saw a surge of popularity in 2020, with many TikTok users posting videos of them using the platform. As of Thursday, videos with the Omegle hashtag have been viewed on TikTok 11.4 billion times. Some creators on TikTok and YouTube had specialized in Omegle “prank” content.
The closure announcement sparked some to recall fond memories of the platform. X users posted their favorite memes spawned from the chat site, including infamous burns and awkward moments.
Still, viral reactions to Omegle’s shutdown largely focused on the platform’s notoriety for connecting minors with adults. Matt Bernstein, a progressive politics influencer who has over 400,000 followers on X, posted: “rip omegle, thoughts and prayers to all the 35 year old men i talked to when i was 14.”
