Are your students using Formspring.me?

Find out more and get useful safety advice here...

Launched in November 2009 ‘Formspring’ is a social website that facilitates a ‘question-and-answer-based’ conversation that is published on a profile page. The questions can be asked with the user’s name hidden, or they can be visibly sent from another Formspring account, according to the user’s preference.
 
Rapidly becoming a talking point in many schools across the South West, the use of Formspring is proving to being a vehicle for inappropriate online behaviour between students, namely bullying.

On February 9, 2011 Fromspring announced it was approaching 22 million registered users. The site realised its ‘unique selling point’ by observing other social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook and identifying user’s desires to post questions about themselves in a ‘get-to-know-me’ type fashion, requiring the recipient to answer. Fromspring adopted this trend and cultivated it into a social networking site that allows an unlimited, uncensored and often anonymous exchange of questions between users. It is this anonymity that provides the ‘bully’ with the opportunity to verbally attack another user online and encourage others to join in.

It is possible for users to apply settings that will only allow friends and / or users who have identified themselves to ask questions. There are also blocking and reporting facilities within the site to deal with those who breach the Terms and Conditions.

Please follow this link: http://about.formspring.me/privacy to find out more about security settings. 

Terms and Conditions can be found from this link: http://about.formspring.me/terms


Published: 17/05/2011 13:28:14