Omegle Shuts Down After Facing Ruinous Lawsuits; This Won’t Magically Solve People Being Awful Online

Omegle has been a controversial service. While Chatroulette got all the attention as a service to randomly connect with video to others online, it grew fast and burned out fast. Omegle was basically the same service, but had a slower ramp up, and became quite popular over the last few years. Except that now Omegle is dead.

While many people will talk about the awful content they encountered on these services, it also enabled some really fun and interesting interactions. I have a friend who was an amateur magician, who would use Omegle as a great way to practice card tricks in front of many, many people in a short period of time. Some others created some really fun content using Omegle, like SomethingAboutChickens, fooling various people they’d connect to with camera tricks.

But, of course, everyone will focus on the controversies. The internet is not just full of good, wholesome fun. There are problematic people online, and so much of the debates over the past few years was whose responsibility should that be. Law firms began to prey on Omegle over the last few years, filing a series of lawsuits, and using it as an attack on Section 230. However, as we noted, getting rid of Section 230 wouldn’t get rid of awful people online, but it would limit the number of services willing to connect people.

We filed an amicus brief in one of the Omegle cases, and the at least some courts seemed to recognize that it made no sense to blame Omegle for problematic actions by its users. But, still, lawsuits are incredibly stressful. Especially for small companies. And the lawsuits also brought with them a lot more attention and scrutiny… and just general anger. I blame the lawyers bringing these terrible cases, who went straight to the media to promote a false story about how Omegle was deliberately and purposely enabling bad people to do bad things. And it seems that all of those attacks took their toll on Leif K-Brooks, the founder of Omegle. Apparently, part of the agreement to settle one of these lawsuits is what made K-Brooks shut down the site, even as he talks about how much effort he put into keeping the site safe:

I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.

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. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.

All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won. It’s a never-ending battle that must be fought and re-fought every day; and even if you do the very best job it is possible for you to do, you may make a sizable dent, but you won’t “win” in any absolute sense of that word. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a basic lesson of criminology, and one that I think the vast majority of people understand on some level. Even superheroes, the fictional characters that our culture imbues with special powers as a form of wish fulfillment in the fight against crime, don’t succeed at eliminating crime altogether.

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.

To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.

He accurately notes the real loss here, which is that it becomes ever more difficult for people to connect with others online:

Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish – specifically, to the bedrock principle of a free society that, when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime.

Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best intentions in the world – then society is practically doing the work of rapists for them.

Fear can be a valuable tool, guiding us away from danger. However, fear can also be a mental cage that keeps us from all of the things that make life worth living. Individuals and families must be allowed to strike the right balance for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances and needs. A world of mandatory fear is a world ruled by fear – a dark place indeed.

I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.

And this is the case with Section 230 in place, which is designed to try to protect companies from these kinds of attacks and to note, within the law, that the responsibility and liability applies directly to the parties who are doing the illegal stuff, not the companies who are giving people a place to connect and to speak.

This situation is actually a perfect example of why Section 230 is so important, and why it needs to remain strong and in place. When it’s working properly, it gets these kinds of legal attacks tossed out quickly. Unfortunately, with Omegle being targeted as a potential method of breaking 230, it took much more effort.

But, again, it’s important to note what K-Brooks was pointing out in this post. Like Backpage and Craigslist before it (both earlier attacks on 230), these companies bent over backwards to work with law enforcement and to help bring the actual criminals to justice. And they still got attacked. And, yet, the bad people are still doing bad stuff… often on sites less interested in being helpful in stopping criminals.

Omegle’s demise is sad for many reasons, but it also really demonstrates just how pathetically counter-productive these attacks are. These attacks destroy the good actors in the space, and give more power to the bad actors. And that’s a real problem.