Calls to bann Ask Fm

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. Historically, a lot of wars have been over the desire to expand a country beyond it's borders or to gain resources. If you have no empathy, or have the power to switch it off, what's to stop you marching in and taking everything people own? People who can 'switch off their empathy' wouldn't switch it back on if they could get great monetary gains by disregarding silly things like compassion, their conscience and the value of human life.

Making money and land gains is a good thing for this country.

Right, and stabbing a kid and stealing whatever they have in their pockets is a good thing for you. It's not a good thing for the kid, but that doesn't matter because you can switch off your empathy, ImNew, and don't have to worry about other people's lives or feelings. Next time you're horny grab somebody in a back alley and force them to have sex with you against their will! Next time you're annoyed with someone, kill them and frame somebody else for their murder!

We should totally 'teach kids to switch off their empathy' because that's definitely a one-way ticket to creating the utopian society we all dream of.

Give yourself over man. It's online and anonymous. Don't like it, leave. What a load of *******s man.

Indeed it is. You know what though, I think it's odd that Facebook facilitates it. Everyone I know who uses it does so through Facebook, and it will surely damage their reputation.

Nice and empathetic I see. I think it's odd that she didn't quit Ask.fm before it escalated that much (though I don't know enough of her circumstances to make a judgement), but she was probably very easily affected by insults as girls of that age often are, and I imagine it was much worse than you're imagining. For example, it people whose opinions you care about kept telling you that you ought to die, do you think you'd be unaffected?

Why are people always trying to find someone to blame? Suicide is self inflicted deal with it.

Emotions are pretty much entirely in our control if we go beyond the mental barrier of believing they are not. Recently it was discovered not that psychopaths do not have empathy, but actually they can turn empathy and emotions off at will. I can turn my empathy off and no I was not born with it, I learned how to do it. If I can learn to turn my empathy and emotions off then so can anybody. If we can learn to effectively teach school children how to turn their emotions off we can prevent future suicides as a result of bullying.

So, in all the newspapers stories are appearing about children that have killed themselves because of this website. As a result, there are Facebook campaigns and letters have been sent to the PM calling for the website to be blocked and deleted.

I'm just interested to see what you people think about this.

I have an ASK.FM account and I made it so people can comfortably ask me anything they want. I received some mild hate, mainly homophobic **** but I just shrugged it off and laughed.

I don't understand why people open themselves up to so much hate on Ask.fm. First of all, they respond to the hate which is a huge factor encouraging the trolls, and drawing attention to the hate that could encourage more trolls. Second of all, why not just delete the account? On the other hand, the website literally serves no use than to ask an individual usually inappropriate questions or to send them hate behind a computer, which the founders make millions from. Not to mention, before ASK it was Formspring, and it's easy for more similar websites to pop up.

It's probably apparent I'm undecided on this, mainly because this whole porn situation I really don't want to see the Government blocking more and more things.

What do you think?

I just don't understand why anyone in the right mind would tell someone to kill themselves and other vile demands, it's awful.

I had ask.fm but never got 'hate'. If I did I would of deleted my account straight away. I've deleted mine now though due to all the suicides it's caused.

I think the government should not cave into what I think is a moral panic to be honest. It should be up to the individual webpage to ensure that people cannot suffer bullying online by having some sort of report button (which Ask may already have, honestly I don't know as I don't use the site) as well as perhaps, since stuff can be posted anonymously some sort of bullying service (or links to other professional services) to deal with the minority of cases which do arise.

If the majority of what went on on there was bullying, that sort of thing, then perhaps I would be inclined to agree, but I reckon it's likely to be a minority, in which case, since we do not ban other things because a minority misbehave, we should leave it alone and let the owners sort it out.

I agree with all of your points. FYI ask does not have a report button which I feel is the main issue


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Yeah, though it will only solve cases where users post nasty material without anonymity unfortunately. There should perhaps be a disclaimer to anyone joining the site before they sign up about the risks of cyber-bullying, with a permanent part of their webpage devoted to it with links to outside help. It'd be impossible, given the anonymity thing (unless they got rid of it) to eradicate cyber-bullying, but it is perhaps possible to give people access to the help they need, which is what should be done by the companies as I said, rather than arbitrarily "fixed" by governments.

I feel like kids should be taught to have a backbone. I just don't feel bad for people that are cyber bullied. It can easily be ignored.

Ridiculous to ban a website that is used trouble free by the vast majority just because something bad has happened to one or two users. You'd think it was some sort of illegal drug being talked about.
Ask.fm is hilarious, great fun at times, if you don't like it don't sign up. If you're upset about some questions you've received that's unfortunate but ultimately not the fault of the website.