Published on April 12th, 2013 | by Sedgrid Lewis
0Ask.fm Parent Review
Ask.fm is one of the newest and hottest social media sites to hit the web. It is a simple question and answer site. Users can ask each other questions anonymously. Ask.fm boasts 16 million registered users along with 85 million uniques views to the website per month. According to the app developers, over 20 million questions are asked per day. Ask.fm has a larger user base in Turkey, Argentina, Saudia Arabia, Spain, and Germany. The site has started to see tremendous growth in U.S The fact that Ask.fm is an international company it is shielded from US Privay laws. Unlike Facebook, there are no privacy controls. The app has come under international fire storm due to several youth committing suicide at the result of Cyberbullying.
Set up
Registration for ask.fm is pretty simple for the user. Users can sign up via Facebook or Twitter. After logging in through Facebook, users are able to request questions from their friends, thus the app has the viral ability to have teens acquire multiple users through facebook’s social graph. Profile
Profile page has your standard social media features. Users are allowed to upload photos to the thier profiles. Just like Facebook the profile pages provides social validation. The top right hand corner shows the number of questions and the number of likes. The biggest feature of the of Ask.fm is that users can ask questions anonymously or they can use their user name. For parents, this a huge concerns with teens. The anonymity begs for harsh sexual content and cyber bullying.
Search
The search feature allows the user to follow certain topics or conversations. After playing around with the site, I discovered a lot of Cyberbullying. Several youth were expressing suicidal ideations. Users were begging them to kill themselves as a response to their questions. There have been several situation where the users followed through and committed suicide. Parents need to be on the look out for this social media sites. It is not well known in the US which leads teens to love it in order to escape the watchful eyes of their parents monitoring Facebook. Most monitoring apps are not designed to track apps such as Ask.Fm.
About the Author
Sedgrid Lewis Sedgrid Lewis is the founder of Spy Parent LLC. He is an internationally recognized safety expert specializing in surveillance equipment, internet monitoring software, and mobile applications for parents and child care professionals. Sedgrid has been highlighted in over 20 major publications. Sedgrid has been covered by Fox News, CBS News, NBC News, Readwrite, Gizmodo, and many more. He is a contributor to Your Teen Magazine.
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