As I get home from school I check ask.fm, along with Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, and Snapchat right away.

Usually, there are a barrage of replies to my questions and an equal amount of questions in my inbox, ranging from “How was your day?” to “What are you wearing right now?” while some are much, much worse.
ask.fm is a social media website that allows users to ask questions of one another either anonymously or with their name displayed.
The website itself was launched in the summer of 2010, the website has over 65 million registered users as of July 4th this year. The website’s slogan is “ask and answer”, but that’s barely what’s going on with the social network.
The idea behind the website is nothing new. A company predating ask.fm called Formspring, now known as justSpring, was launched in 2009, almost a year before the release of ask.fm. However, the newer company has far surpassed Spring.me in both popularity and users over the past few years.
The website works as follows. A user of the website signs up for an account, using their email, Facebook, Twitter, or VK.com. They are then allowed to set up their own page where people can ask them questions and read the ones that they have answered in the past. On top of that, people are also able to freely visit others pages, sending comments, questions, or replies.
On a normal day, ask.fm is a fun way to learn more about your friends or strangers. There are plenty of different accounts solely on the social network for comedy or parody. However, where the website turns dark is the fact that the anonymity is often abused, and in a harsh and reckless fashion as well.
Having used it for a few months now, I have witnessed countless examples of cyber-bullying and harassment, and it makes you wonder, how far will people go to ruin somebody’s day? Quite far.
Unfortunately, ask.fm is not exempt from a grim history. Anonymous people caused the suicide of a 16-year-old girl last winter, stirring up major controversies about the website. Many people even campaigned to have it shut down.
However, I have to defend the website. Cyberbullying, even to an extreme extent, is not exclusive to ask.fm. Countless suicides have been linked with other social media websites, yet they are not offline because of that.
ask.fm can be a harmless tool to have fun on the internet, but everything has a bad side to it. You have to look at everything, no website is perfect. Of course, the social network was never meant to be used as a tool to dish out hate messages and vulgar comments anonymously, but people will always find a way to take advantage of something for evil.