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. Sometimes, we would add “tags” to filter the people we matched with by interest: One Direction, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande. 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. “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. “The internet is full of cool people,” the site’s tagline claimed. The sole function of Omegle, created in 2009, was to match users at random for one-on-one video chats. They would have been horrified if they’d known who we “met” on Omegle. It was ours to explore, and our parents – and politicians – were none the wiser. We were children, but we were also the guinea pigs of this burgeoning internet space. The iPhone, Instagram, Tumblr – all were relatively new inventions. It was 2012, and the possibilities of social media still felt new and exciting to young teens like us.
We were not looking for the penises on the now defunct anonymous chat room Omegle, but they would find us nonetheless.
