There’s a new breeding ground for potential predators and bullies and it's not Facebook or Myspace. It's a site called formspring.me. One parent calls the site “sickening.”FOX23’s Abbie Alford explains how the site works and what the attraction is for teens and predators.
On formspring.me anyone can ask a question and the user would have no idea who it is asking the questions.
That can be scary and one father discovered someone out there posted extremely obscene questions for his 15-year-old daughter.
There’s a web of online social networking sites and more teens are no longer content with Myspace, Facebook and Twitter.
Instead, teens are using chatroulette.com, a webcam chatroom with strangers and other chatrooms such as Xanga or Yahoo360.
However, there’s another evolving social networking site called formspring.me.
"'Everybody else was using it. It was the happening thing to do. like MySpace and Facebook everyone is doing it," says Eric Morris of his 15-year-old daughter.
Morris is very disturbed about this chat site, an open forum to ask any question anonymously.
"Very vulgar. The worst questions that you think are being asked to your daughter. It was bad," says Morris. "It's kind of sickening is what it is."
The questions posed to his daughter were so sexual.
"The questions to me seemed very predator type," says Morris. "You don't know where they are coming from. You don't know if they are their friends or if they are somebody looking for information."
The online world can be a frightening open door into kids’ lives.
That’s why this father pays attention and keeps track of where is daughter is online. It’s not to be nosy but for her protection.
“As being a parent of four kids, the last thing I want is anything to happen to any of my girls and I would hate for anything to happen to anyone else's girls," says Morris.
The father says he and her mother shut down their daughter’s formspring.me account and continue to monitor her online activity.
FOX23 also found teen bullies on formspring.me. There were some local threats being made to another teen. The threats were too explicit to share with our readers.
There is still a grey area for laws against social networking sites, however, advocates encourage parents to report their concerns to police and the local school district.
