Guest Blog: A Teen Sounds Off on Formspring.Me
by Julia
Finally! Any teen in America can find out what their peers think of them with the use of the new website Formspring. The appeal of Formspring is that you can ask questions anonymously. Though it has turned into a place where you can talk trash about people with no consequences. Now it’s as if, since the comment is anonymous, everyone has lost the filter that tells him or her what not to say.
I know very few males who use Formspring. The appeal is to females. I think in general girls want to believe that people will anonymously write nice things about them. They suffer from classic ‘good girl’ syndrome as Rachel Simmons would put it. They want to believe that everyone likes them and will write about it on a Formspring.
The other appeal is that just like in life when you hear that someone’s been talking about you, you automatically want to know, who said it, what they said, why they said it. Formspring fulfills 1/3 of those questions, what they said.
People use Formspring to say things like, “ur ugly” or “none of ur friends like u and they think ur fat.”
Why would anyone subject herself to that kind of horrible stuff? Well, there’s the idea that someone will feel bad or stick up for you and write something complimentary to defend you. Plus, once you get a Formspring there’s the feeling that you can’t delete it.
I asked my friend “Sarah” why she wouldn’t delete her Formspring after the awful things people were saying. She responded, “Because I don’t want people to call me a p***y. I have to seem like I can take the insults.”
Which leads me to those girls who try to brush off the insults or people who are aggressive back. Many girls try to make it seem like they don’t care about the awful things that are being said about them in order to show that they are stronger than the anonymous insulter.
The thing that really shocked me was that a person would anonymously post that a girl was a whore, a loner, that her adopted parents were ashamed of her and that she should kill herself, but that wasn’t even the worst part. What really made me think was when people started to agree.
There were over 25 posts telling this girl that her parents don’t love her and that she should kill herself. What scares me about comments like this is that recently a 17 year old, named Alexis Pilkington committed suicide and it is speculated that Formspring cyber bullying was one of the factors in her death.
Julia, 16, is a high school sophomore who lives near Philadelphia, PA.
My 13 year old daugther no longer has a form spring but this does not stop bullies for posting sexual rumors on every person she knows formspring site. Formspring should be held accountable for createing a forum for cyber bullying and intend to find a way for them to be held accountable. I think parents should not allow this to occur and take the attitude “let the kid handle it” because grown adults would have a hard time dealing with slander, threats, etc… it needs to stop.
I’m gonna be 7th grade girl and I don’t have a formspring. No offence but I think it’s kinda stupid. Sending questions without them knowing is just seting people to get hurt. But I just wanna say, I was a 6th grader!!! We do swear and people call each other sluts and whores. There’s backstabbing and rumors and people going out. You parents don’t know about it because we think you want us to be perfect little kids and we have dirtier minds than you think. But I do agree with you about Formspring. It’s just a way for people to get hurt. But you need to understand that kids know more dirty things than you think.
I am a 13 year old girl in eight grade. I do have a Formspring. I got to this article when I looked up on Google “How do you find out who is saying things on your Formspring?” Yes, I know that Formspring can be really negative, but I see how the article did not include positive things about Formspring. You can talk to your friends that maybe do not have a Facebook, a Myspace, or a phone. You have a choice to delete bad things on your profile. You can take fun surveys. People also can write nice things on your profile anonymously. Someone recently wrote, “U r very pretty” on my profile. Other people say, “U r ugly”, “Youre a whore”, and worse things than that. All you have to tell yourself is that those people are probably scared of you to say it to your face or put their name on the question, or they simply dont feel good about themselves. I am hear to say that Formspring is not for everyone, but it can be very enjoyable.
People with a formspring account have the ability to choose which questions or comments they can publish. Obviously, a 6th grade girl does not belong on formspring. But a late teenage girl should know what she is getting into before making one. Or should just delete the vulgar comments.
[...] sure there’s potential for all kinds of nefarious nutcases and psychological terrorizing, (even teens seem to agree) but I also happen to be highly immersed in anecdotal behavioral evidence that a ‘ban’ on this [...]
I’m a 15 year old guy and I recently made a speech in school based on the prompt “what do you wish adults could know/learn/do to better understand kids”
I did my speech on how everything published focuses on the bad side. I focused on sexting and hazing (using April and February 2010 Family Circle issues as main sources). I quoted these articles heavily, which I think made my class fall asleep, and then commented on how I find some of these examples hard to believe. Although I have been told “Ohh you’re just so sheltered” I really find this hard to believe. I ended asking for more research to look at the good things teens do and our good interactions with one another.
Thanks for this blog. My sixth grader is not on Formspring but many of the “cool” kids in her grade are on and she asked me if she could get an account. I told her that I wanted to see what people were using it for so she showed me a few of her friends’ pages. After viewing a few pages, I said “no way.” The innocuous stuff was “which girl do you like in the sixth grade?” or “I think I know which boy you like” but pretty quickly, every page devolved into “you are a slut and a whore and I know you want to have sex with every boy in the sixth grade” or in the case of the boys “you are a loser and a weirdo and a freak.” Then you would have the person’s friends: “she’s not a slut. she’s a really nice girl” or the person himself “I’m not a loser.” I saw some of the comments on Rachel’s blog by teenagers who think this is fine and it toughens kids up for the “real world.” But no sixth grade girl needs to read that she is a slut even if she has the greatest self esteem in the world. I wonder about a generation of kids who think that this is okay. I don’t and I am not raising my kids to think it is okay either. I also wonder whether all these kids who are using this kind of language (and there was a lot of profanity) because they think it is anonymous might be unpleasantly surprised when there is a lawsuit against formspring for defamation and it all turns out to be accessed through discovery. This is a new area of law but there are cases going through the court system in which anonymous posters on certain websites were identified through discovery. http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/07/autoadmit