So...there's this site/app called Ask.fm and it's super popular at my school. It's basically a site to send people questions, and you can choose whether to send them anonymously or not (really creepy). From what I've seen, it seems to just be a place to send people hate, or really creepy messages. There have been cases of severe cyber-bullying, which have even resulted in suicides, because of this site. Please let people know of how dangerous this site is! Also, if you're older and have kids, make sure they don't get into this site; it seems to still be going strong regardless of all the bullying for some reason. I can imagine it would be more dangerous for people who are part of the LGBT+ community, because the more "quiet" homophobic/transphobic people would likely take advantage of the anonymity and unleash their cruelness on there.
I wouldn't say it's the app itself, it rarely is, but the people involved with using it. Some people will always exploit or take advantage of something, usually resulting in it being misused and abused. Even if you were to eliminate Ask.fm, something else would take it's place and the cycle would resume. This is a case of putting a band-aid on the cut, but leaving the glass on the sidewalk.
Yeah, sadly that doesn't surprise me. Lot of forums and apps are unfortunately like that. And think sites like Ask.Fm maybe attract the wrong kinds of people due to the vibe and culture of the site itself.
As a person who used to have a Formspring (back when Formspring existed), which was more or less the same thing, my opinion is that it's...really not the site's own fault. Users can opt to disable anonymous questions. Anon questions aren't creepy in and of themselves. Most of my questions were anonymous, and 99% of them were just dumb inane questions like the sort of thing you'd find on an about-me meme, asked by shy folks or friends of mine who wanted to see if I could guess who was asking. By this logic, tumblr should be avoided at all costs because it has an anonymous option in the askbox, as should an awful lot of sites. I recommend spreading the message for people to disable anon if they're uncomfortable with the idea of receiving anonymous questions or are worried about anonymous cyberbullying, or avoiding the site altogether if they're really concerned. The internet, sadly, lends itself to misuse wherever gross folks can find an opportunity to misuse it. I can only echo what Kaiser said, really!
