Blog

Omegle shuts down after 14 years: Creepy website that allowed users to video chat with random strangers closes amid claims it paired children with paedophiles. Free online chat site Omegle was touted as a ‘great way to meet new friends’ but it is facing lawsuits for repeatedly pairing children with sexual predators

Online chat website Omegle has shut down after repeated claims that it facilitated child abuse.

The site, which randomly paired people with strangers and became particularly popular among children during Covid lockdowns, had around 73million visitors a month.

Omegle was touted by its creator as a ‘great way to meet new friends’, but it came under fire for failing to protect minors by pairing them with paedophiles.

Read more here. 

WARRIOR WEDNESDAY💙TAKE ACTION! Our allies at FAIRPLAY FOR KIDS are launching a Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) Day of Action TODAY.

KOSA (S.1409) currently has 47 co-sponsors. This legislation will hold social media companies accountable for protecting children online by cresting a “Duty of Care” for online platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to children.

TODAY, please email and tweet your Senator and share the graphics and captions found in the below toolkit on your social media pages and with your network. Reach out to your Senators:

Thank you. #ProtectOurKids #OnlineSafety

A top Big Tech whistleblower is expected to drag Facebook for company policies that are perpetuating the teen mental health crisis during a Senate hearing Tuesday.

Facebook, which recently rebranded to ‘Meta,’ is accused by a former compliance official Arturo Bejar of ignoring information that would protect teens and rolling back safety protocols to protect its bottom line.

And it is a rare issue that is unifying Republicans and Democrats.

GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., met with Bejar last week and said he presented new evidence to back up claims that Meta executives ‘knowingly’ turned a blind eye to the ‘horrific harms to young people on the company’s platforms.’

From Bejar’s disclosures, the senators said they uncovered information revealing the executives were ‘personally warned’ that millions of American teens opened their apps immediately to eating disorder, drug and sex content.

Read more here. 

A seedy Queens brothel is being brazenly advertised on social media as having “really good, delicious” women.

“We are here with all the ladies,” a woman says in Spanish in the video, posted to TikTok by @zombiesinnyc on Oct. 19.

“Yes. So the public knows what is the good, the really good, delicious,” another woman says in the clip, which provides the brothel’s address in Corona.

The video shows a handful of lingerie-clad women sitting around on couches as men linger nearby and has the words “Inside a W#0r3 house” written over it.

The rooms are dark and neon light shows appear to be projected onto the walls.

Read more here. 

One afternoon last month, hundreds of students at Timber Creek High School in Orlando poured into the campus’s sprawling central courtyard to hang out and eat lunch. For members of an extremely online generation, their activities were decidedly analog. Dozens sat in small groups, animatedly talking with one another. Others played pickleball on makeshift lunchtime courts. There was not a cellphone in sight — and that was no accident.

In May, Florida passed a law requiring public school districts to impose rules barring student cellphone use during class time. This fall, Orange County Public Schools — which includes Timber Creek High — went even further, barring students from using cellphones during the entire school day.

In interviews, a dozen Orange County parents and students all said they supported the no-phone rules during class. But they objected to their district’s stricter, daylong ban. Parents said their children should be able to contact them directly during free periods, while students described the all-day ban as unfair and infantilizing. “They expect us to take responsibility for our own choices,” said Sophia Ferrara, a 12th grader at Timber Creek who needs to use mobile devices during free periods to take online college classes. “But then they are taking away the ability for us to make a choice and to learn responsibility.”

AI-generated pornographic images of female students at a New Jersey high school were circulated by male classmates, sparking parent uproar and a police investigation, according a report.

Students at Westfield High School — located in Westfield, a town about 25 miles west of Manhattan where the average household income is $259,377, according to Forbes — told the Wall Street Journal that one or more classmates used an online AI-backed tool to create the racy images and then shared them with peers.

A mother whose daughter is a student at Westfield High School, recounting what her child told her to the Journal, said sophomore boys at the school were acting “weird” on Monday, Oct. 16.

Read more here. 

Listen here and #BeAWarrior

Rep. Reckitt was the longtime director of Family Crisis Services in Portland and was the driving force behind Maine’s proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

Rep. Lois Galgay Reckitt, D-South Portland, shown at the State House in June. She pressed for an Equal Rights Amendment for five decades. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

Lois Galgay Reckitt, a state representative from South Portland and a longtime activist for women’s rights, died Monday. She was 78.

“I am so saddened by Lois’ passing,” said Speaker of the House Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland. “She will be remembered as a trailblazer, a feminist icon, and for her relentless efforts on behalf of Maine women and families. I was blessed to know Lois for five decades and I will never forget her courage, resiliency, and her fierce dedication to justice. Her legacy of leadership and her tenacity will continue to inspire us all.”

Reckitt’s family said she died of colon cancer.

“I’ve always admired my Aunt Lois” Reckitt’s nephew Dan Saulnier, told the Press Herald on Tuesday. “She spent her whole life in service to others and fighting for a more just world. And yet she was always there if I needed support, or advice, or just to get away. I’ve never met anyone quite like her, and I’ll miss her deeply.”

Read more here. 

Tune in and #BeAWarrior

Listen here.  

Past Episodes. 

From the Philippines to Colombia, low-paid workers label training data for AI models used by the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

In 2016, Oskarina Fuentes got a tip from a friend that seemed too good to be true. Her life in Venezuela had become a struggle: Inflation had hit 800 percent under President Nicolás Maduro, and the 26-year-old Fuentes had no stable job and was balancing multiple side hustles to survive.

Her friend told her about Appen, an Australian data services company that was looking for crowdsourced workers to tag training data for artificial intelligence algorithms. Most internet users will have done some form of data labeling: identifying images of traffic lights and buses for online captchas. But the algorithms powering new bots that can pass legal exams, create fantastical imagery in seconds, or remove harmful content on social media are trained on datasets—images, video, and text—labeled by gig economy workers in some of the world’s cheapest labor markets.

Appen’s clients have included Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, and the company’s 1 million contributors are just a part of a vast, hidden industry. The global data collection and labeling market was valued at $2.22 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to $17.1 billion by 2030, according to consulting firm Grand View Research. As Venezuela slid into an economic catastrophe, many college-educated Venezuelans like Fuentes and her friends joined crowdsourcing platforms like Appen.

Read more here.