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Anonymous video chat app Omegle, known for pairing strangers and weirdos together in a kind of raw, extended social experiment, finally threw in the towel after years of abuse. The site was forced to shut down due to a settlement from a recent lawsuit alleging the site gave free rein to sexual predators.
Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks told users “The battle for Omegle has been lost” in a sprawling, meandering notice posted to his site Thursday. The Vermont native said he made the decision after years of attempting to moderate how different users were paired with each other, but the “stress and expense of this fight—coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse—are simply too much.”
A $22 million lawsuit filed by a 19-year-old woman alleged that when she was 11 years old she was paired with a late 30s Canadian man on a video chat through Omegle. The woman, who went by A.M. in the suit, said that over three years the man coerced her to take off her clothes and perform sexual acts in front of the camera, then threatened to release those images if she didn’t do as he demanded. Canadian police eventually arrested the man and the courts sentenced him to eight and a half years in prison.
Brooks tried to get the suit dismissed for years, but according to court documents Omegle and the parents settled the case out of court for undisclosed terms earlier this month. Carrie Goldberg, a New York-based attorney who led the case against the site, confirmed with Gizmodo that Omegle shutting down was one of the terms of their settlement. On X, Goldberg wrote, “Thank you to our client A.M. for convincing Omegle of its human cost.”
Omegle started its video chat capabilities in 2010 which let random users talk even though both were only labeled as “You” and “Stranger.” For more than a decade, Omegle’s terms of service allowed anybody 13 years or older to access the site. That openness and anonymization features led to a number of incidents where young people were paired with adults and even several sexual predators.
Omegle previously tried to implement some video monitoring software, though the site was constantly hit with allegations it was being used to spread pornography, racism, and anti-Semitism. In 2022, Brooks changed his site’s terms of service to restrict it to those 18 and up. Of course, that didn’t necessarily stop the abuse. The FBI alleged back in June that a 28-year-old man met a 14-year-old girl on Omegle, and after trading sexually explicit images back and forth he kidnapped her, then tried to get her back on Omegle in order to sell more nude images. FBI agents eventually managed to track her through her Nintendo Switch.
Brooks said in the meandering declaration of defeat that his goal was never to facilitate these harms since he too was a self-described “survivor of childhood rape.” In his own words, his goal was to “build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere.” He further claimed that the anonymized nature of the video service added a layer of safety, but the site eventually employed “state-of-the-art AI” alongside a team of human moderators.
The Omegle founder said he was upset at Omegle’s end, alleging it was akin to “shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there.” He also complained that other, far larger tech companies face some of the same problems. It’s true that most big social media sites regularly have to fight back against child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Some sites are much better than others in that regard.
But it doesn’t take much imagination to see how anonymized voice chats with limited moderation can go spectacularly wrong. There is certainly a debate to be had about maintaining online freedoms in the face of upcoming regulations like the UK Online Safety Bill, but at least Omegle won’t be one of the voices in that crowd.
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