What Every Parent Should Know About Formspring: The New Cyberscourge for Teens
Last week, a Long Island high school senior committed suicide, and the website Formspring.me is suspected as a cause. Yet most parents don’t even know it exists. Formspring is the latest cyberscourge for teens. It lets you open an account and allows your anonymous audience – usually your classmates – to communicate with brutal honesty. By which I mean breathtaking cruelty.
Formspring takes cybercruelty to a new low by making it appear consensual. You sign up for your own account, literally inviting others to bash you with their “honest” opinions. Because it appears consensual, it no longer seems like cybercruelty at all. It just becomes another avenue for teens to communicate, and it desensitizes them to what they’re doing.
“I hate you,” writes one peer.
“You’re slutty,” opines another.
Account holders are always able to respond, and most act as if they don’t care.
“I’d f*** you,” muses one.
“thanks I mean very blunt but still flattering,” responds the account holder.
Remember, these are often friends writing the comments. To wit:
“I’ve known you for a long time. you’re not even that good at soccer. you just had one really good season…”
As you might expect, cyberbombs like this usually launch the account holder into an extended freak out about who could have written it. Imagine walking the halls or sitting in class, never knowing who is saying what on your Formspring. Not exactly conducive to good focus on your studies, if you get my drift.
I suspect girls are especially vulnerable to Formspring for several reasons:
1. Most girls are passionately invested in their friendships and what others think of them. At the same time, they constantly second guess their peers about what they really think and mean. As I showed in The Curse of the Good Girl, the ubiquity of “just kidding” and the pressure to keep friendships conflict-free force lots of truth underground. Girls know it. Formspring gives you a perverse chance to “really find out what others think of you.”
2. Many girls define social success as being liked by everyone. Despite my best efforts as a speaker, educator and mentor to tell girls that it just ain’t gonna happen, Formspring lets hope spring eternal: you can open an account and maybe, just maybe, you won’t get a mean comment. You’ll be that girl who everyone really loves!
There is zero, and I mean zero, value in this website and no girl or boy should spend a minute on it. Formspring creates unnecessary emotional risks. It legitimizes cybercruelty and divorces kids from responsibility for their words. You can pretty much file Formspring along with wouldn’t-it-be-fun-to-stand-on the-railroad-tracks-and-jump-right-before-the-train-comes and I’m-sure-no-one-will-notice-if-I-just-pocket-this-one-mascara.
So what to do? Here’s what I suggest. Start a conversation with your daughter about Formspring. Ask her if people at school use it (don’t start off by grilling her about what she does or she may scare and fly away). Ask her what she thinks of it. Then ask her if she uses it.
If she says yes, tell her she’s banned for life from the website. Period. Here’s what I tell kids when I suggest they to stop using it:
1. It’s an invitation for people to be evil to each other without taking responsibility, which means people will exaggerate and even outright lie just to hurt you.
2. By inviting people to say harmful things to you, and spending time reading about it, you disrespect yourself.
3. There will always be haters. You will never be someone who is 100% liked by everyone. That doesn’t mean you need to set up a website to catalog who those people are. Focus on the relationships that bring you happiness and security, not people who tear you down.
Even if your daughter says no one has ever said anything mean to her, hold your ground. It’s only a matter of time.
If your daughter denies having an account, open your own account here (it’s very easy) and begin searching for your daughter by her name. Most kids include their full names in their accounts.
If you know me, you know I’m not in the habit of telling you to go behind your kid’s back. You can imagine how dangerous I find this website if I’m urging you to do it at all.
Listen to what I have to say to girls about Formspring in this episode of BFF 2.0.
Yeah, people are immature and stupid, by posting really mean things on people Formspring, but come on it’s high school students, what do you expect? Although it’s pretty pathetic to kill yourself because of what someone thinks of you. So what if someone thinks that about you, brush it off and move on. It’s never made me paranoid about who said something bad about me, I honestly don’t care if they don’t like me. I like me and plenty of others do too. I’m pretty sure I could list 1,000 better reasons to kill yourself.
I also used formspring and my mother found out but she did the EXACT thing that someone shouldnt do. when i had mine, at first ppl were nice but then ppl started saying “FAT SLUT” and other hurtful things. My cousin gave me advice to delete but i didnt listen and then i was rlly badly hurt about what ppl said. My cousin also said one of her friends called her in the middle of the night during the summer sobbing that some other person was going out with this girls boyfriend. my cousin also told her to delete it and she did and everything was better for her. but kids shouldnt use it.
Eh, I don’t know, I kind of agree and kind of disagree. I feel that Formspring is exactly as you described — it lowers one’s dignity, encourages cruelty and makes us paranoid. I’ve been wanting to get a Formspring for awhile, so I decided to google it and see what the online world thought (even though I knew it’d be bad things, which is kinda what it’d be like to get a Formspring).
So anyway, I came across this article, and I think it’s a bit silly that you want parents to ban the site. Like the other girl said, we’re teenagers who can make their own decision. And in this generation, online freedom means a lot to us. By allowing us to create Formspring accounts, no matter how hurtful they can be, you’re allowing us to exercise our rights as young adults. But yeah, I’d discourage getting one, they only lead to broken hearts.
I think you are right in someways. This site can make some people very sad or create emotional scars. However I don’t think this is a reason good enough to ban the whole site. As it was said before, when you can go to settings, you can stop anonymous questions coming. Or ban somebody. If you are afraid of the bad comments that can come to your page, then don’t get a formspring account to begin with. We, the formspring users, are aware of the fact that we might get stupid and hurtful questions from other people. We get our accounts ready to face those comments. Also, formspring is not an evil site. It lets you to express yourself and have fun. I, personally, do like formspring a lot. And i have got hundreds of bad posts until now. However, they don’t interest me since they are just ordinary stuff idiot people write. I don’t even care. And most of the people don’t either. If they do care about insults, they should close their accounts. Done. It will end everything. So I think that this site may be very harmful to extremely sensitive people so they just shouldn’t get accounts. However, because that some people might get hurt,you can not ban the site.
People can be cruel.
Emotionally damaged and immature kids can be particularly vicious.
But this seems silly to me.
I don’t see how formspring is so different from any other social networking site.
Maybe this was different when the entry was written, but now there seem to be decent privacy controls to restrict access.
If you have idiot people following a name around the internet then … that’s what happens.
I can see how formspring could be an interesting and worthwhile, assuming a token maturity of people involved.
The cruelty seems to be a youth culture/phenomenon grown up around a site.
I question how related to the actual forum it is; If the design some how encourages this?
Again I’m skeptical.
Seriously? I fit the profile of “a teenage girl” that you talk about, and I don’t care at all if some anonymous person writes hateful comments about me. I have a formspring account because I want to, not because of my peers. Not only this, but you can block anonymous people from contacting you. Do that if anything. It should be between us if we want to use the site, it’s fun. It’s entertaining. Not everything people say on there is bad. If a single parent doesn’t like it, they can try to stop their kids from using it. That’s all. Quit trying to ban an entire site because of your stupid opinions.
it’s not just a single parent that is against this site, though…hundreds of thousands are! and, i am too! i’m fifteen as well, and to be honest, i’m not willing to surrender all of the self-worth, dignity and honor i have by getting a formspring. how is the site entertaining? how is it fun? i honestly c no value in it! comments may not hurt u, but it hurts the majority of us! teenagers, unfortunately, become paranoid, anxious, and depressed from these sites, up to the point where they kill themselves! y risk it? y put urself in that position? if u want to ask someone a question, use facebook, use twitter, but by getting a formspring and waiting to hear all of the things people say about u, ur clearly stating to the world “i am disrespecting myself and am very self-conscious about what other people think.” and if u do block anonymous people from leaving comments, then still, what’s the point of having one? there is none. and we all have opinions here, and i respect yours, but please don’t call other people’s opinions “stupid.” its quite disrespectful and pretty immature.