It was usually only a matter of minutes before we’d see the first penis. As we huddled giggling around someone’s family computer, hauled into a bedroom for secrecy, they became a routine part of our childhood sleepovers. One after another, the penises would flash up on screen, as we fell about screaming with laughter, half-covering our eyes with our school jumper sleeves.
“Ewwww! Next, next!” Someone would click “next”. The routine began again.
We were not looking for the penises on the now defunct anonymous chat room Omegle, but they would find us nonetheless.
It was 2012, and the possibilities of social media still felt new and exciting to young teens like us. The iPhone, Instagram, Tumblr – all were relatively new inventions. We were children, but we were also the guinea pigs of this burgeoning internet space. It was ours to explore, and our parents – and politicians – were none the wiser. They would have been horrified if they’d known who we “met” on Omegle.
The sole function of Omegle, created in 2009, was to match users at random for one-on-one video chats. “The internet is full of cool people,” the site’s tagline claimed. “Omegle lets you meet them.” Who exactly you’d meet, however, was a gamble, as users did not have to provide a username or profile picture. You didn’t even need to make an account before you came face-to-face with anyone else, of any age, who also happened to be online at the time, in any part of the world.
The anonymity was alluring to us. Sometimes, we would add “tags” to filter the people we matched with by interest: One Direction, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande. According to court documents, sexual predators used the site to encourage children to perform sex acts, to show them pornography, or to lure them into real-life meetings, Mother Jones reported last year. One lawsuit against Omegle declared the “most regular and popular use” of the site was “live sexual activity, such as online masturbation”.
“Who’s your fave member of 1D?” I remember asking a black screen in an Omegle chat. “Take your top off,” the screen replied.
Last week, 14 years after its launch, Omegle announced it was shutting down for good. The news comes after the company was sued by a woman accusing the site of randomly pairing her with a predator. The $22m lawsuit alleged that when she was 11, she encountered a man on Omegle who coerced her through grooming into three years of “sexual servitude”. She is not alone: the site has been mentioned in at least 50 cases against predators in recent years, according to the BBC. (The woman and Omegle settled in early November.)
The news of Omegle’s closure is prompting some people in my generation to, perhaps for the first time, grapple with who and what they encountered on the site as kids.
Harry* was 14 the first time he used Omegle alone.
“I used to go on it all the time with my friends at sleepovers – we’d chat to groups of girls and make crude jokes and stuff,” he told me.
Like many boys his age, Harry had become curious about his sexuality, but he didn’t know who to share his secret with.
“I hadn’t even confronted it with myself, really – I carried a lot of shame about it and wasn’t open at all,” he said.
“Omegle had a reputation for being a place where you’d see random or shocking things, but also where you’d see loads of naked men masturbating. It felt like this dark place on the internet where I could explore what I saw as a dark side of myself.”
One evening after school, after Harry’s parents had gone out, he logged on to the family computer to use Omegle by himself. He was randomly paired with an adult man, who started complimenting his body. “Are you into guys?” the man asked Harry, assuring him it was nothing to be ashamed of. Then the man showed Harry his penis.
“He was asking me if I liked it, and he asked me to do it too,” Harry said. “He guided me step by step, complimenting me the whole time, and I ended up masturbating in front of the camera.”
It made Harry feel grown up at the time: “It was almost like I felt like I was in a TV show, doing something really adult and exciting for the first time. Thinking about it, it all felt very much like a script.”
“It’s weird to look back on,” said Harry, now 26. “I hope it hasn’t affected me, like psychologically.”
Omegle had 54m monthly visits by January 2021, according to Semrush. “Omg, some of the things I saw on there …” one friend messaged me after it shut down. “Totally forgot about Omegle! Feel like I blocked it out lol. I think a lot more people used it than would like to admit,” said another. “So. Many. Penises.”
Then a message came in from Adam*, a friend of my cousin, who told me that he had seen someone take their own life on Omegle.
“I used to go on Omegle just with my mates,” he said. “Over the years using it, I’ve seen two people appearing to self-harm.” He wasn’t sure if the videos were pre-recorded and played on screen or not. “Either way, it’s still really traumatic for anyone to see,” he said.
At 18, Adam is of a generation for whom I assumed Omegle would have been passé. But the site actually saw a surge in popularity during the Covid lockdowns, when lonely teenagers sought company from a roulette of strangers online. (So did Chatroulette, another random video chat site that was founded the same year as Omegle.) It wasn’t until last year that Omegle updated its terms of service, stating that the site was for adults only. Previously, it had allowed children aged 13 and above, as long as they said they had parental supervision.
“I don’t remember any kind of parental controls when I used to use it,” said Maddie*, 24. “I went on it all the time with my friends and stuff – we were like 13 – and it was just a carousel of penises.
“Sometimes I’d go on it by myself, if my parents were out. One time, this old man, maybe in his 40s, asked me to show him my bra. I honestly don’t know what was going through my head, but I did it. And he was all: ‘Wow, wow, you’re so beautiful,’” she said. “It makes me feel sick thinking about now, but I guess it was validating for me at the time, I don’t know.”
Maddie never told anyone, including her parents, what had happened. “My mum would be devastated if she found out,” she said. “They were doing their best to protect us, but they just weren’t equipped.”
Children always think they know more than adults, and at the time, in terms of the internet, the reality was that we did. It was a bizarre contradiction – sitting in school assemblies while teachers warned of the danger of talking to strangers on the street, or of a “white van man” who might be lurking in the area, all while we had direct access to potential predators from our bedrooms.
In a lengthy closing-down statement, Omegle’s founder, Leif K-Brooks, claimed that he had set the site up to fulfill the “basic human need” of “meeting new people”, but acknowledged it had been used by some “to commit unspeakably heinous crimes”.
“Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility,” he said. “The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother ‘happy birthday’, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat.”
He contended that “the battle for Omegle has been lost”. In hindsight, it’s hard to see how Omegle could have become anything but a hotbed of abuse.
It has been over a decade since I last used Omegle. For years, those 12-year-old sleepovers were a distant memory. Now, like Harry, Adam and Maddie, I’m finding it strange and difficult to look back, to confront that experience and see it for what it was – that I and a generation of children were the victims of systematic grooming and sexual exploitation.
*Names have been changed for anonymity.
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
