Unmasking Omegle: The Chatroom will Always be Racial

Make it stand out

2023 has killed social spontaneity. As we wave off BeReal and Omegle is put to rest, how we view authenticity in our online spaces has reduced massively this past year alone. Omegle, a website known for ‘talking to strangers’, was shut down in November 2023 due to claims of sexual exploitation of young people but founder Leif K-Brooks created the website at age 18 with the idea that an internet connection should be leveraged to connect with the “many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer”. These ideals of “social spontaneity”, as K-Brooks put it in his statement, had been abused by “a malicious subset of users”, leaving its creator no choice – after heavy moderation – but to shut up shop. 

As gen z and generation alpha became increasingly tethered to technology, they warmed to the Omegle as an isolated space, one where their comprehension of the internet’s capacity to connect to others broadened just as much as their understanding of themselves. The website would randomly pair you with another user, anywhere in the world, and begin a video call with a text chat. “These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else,” K-Brooks explained. “It was the idea of ‘meeting new people’ distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.” You are labelled ‘You’ and the other user is aptly named ‘Stranger’.

Ending the chat “for whatever reason” refers not just to your own agency and tolerance, but also, your inherent bias. Because what continues to be overlooked by the coverage of the website’s closure – but is universally understood among Black users – is how race influenced experiences on Omegle in ways that were undoubtedly traumatising to the children and teenagers who used it. When you have seconds to make an impression or risk being skipped, visible blackness can make an impression for you, and there’s no more startling reminder of universal anti-blackness than the global chatroom. My (non-Black) best friend and I would use the site for fun. But from Mumbai to Memphis, the world’s favourite racial epithet was flung at me repeatedly. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

If you can remember singer/rapper Doja Cat’s alleged chat room antics that led rapper Noreaga to tweet: “she on racial chat rooms showing feet!”, I’d go as far as saying the very nature of existing as a Black person in these spaces renders the chatroom ‘racial.’ 

“When you have seconds to make an impression or risk being skipped, visible blackness can make an impression for you, and there’s no more startling reminder of universal anti-blackness than the global chatroom.”

For some, Omegle serves as an intimate form of cultural and racial exchange. There is a burden of responsibility, with fetishes and othering to navigate. I was confronted with this truth, time and time again: the chatroom will always be racial – as long as you were seen as less of a person and more of a porn category. Creator keishab can attest to this: a YouTube video documenting her session on Omegle comes with a disclaimer that the video has strong language “as well as the constant use of the N word”. She says, “[Omegle]’s just fun! It's just so entertaining and funny… But I'm gonna try and be brave.” After repeated instances of racist language and harassment, she is sobbing. Keishab’s video validated the shockingly candid experiences I’d encountered too. Though I lived in a quiet corner of London, I’d seen teenage KKK bedroom rallies, stared down the barrel of someone’s purported gun through a webcam and had a 6-year-old child ask if I pick cotton. I can shoulder that as an adult. I can pass that off as being a laughably cartoonish and deeply American understanding of race, and I don’t believe that the great potential the Internet holds for valuable exchange can ever be sullied by the amount of hatred on these platforms anyway. Yes, the internet’s architecture – its accessibility, inexpensiveness and anonymity – serves as a potent tool for vitriol. It’s not something we’re just learning. Live gaming chats, like the chatroom, is a further extension of this. But despite its murky history, I – like many – experienced sincere interactions on Omegle. I’d chatted extensively with a girl from India – a self-proclaimed ‘huge Anglophile’. I’ve spoken at length with a man from Russia about his delayed love and appreciation for his family. I virtually talked with someone from Northern Ireland, the same age as me at the time (23), who described Omegle as an ‘online smoking area’, explaining that he’d use it casually after a night out. 

Personally, I’ve never known a smoking area to house so many masturbating men, but I gladly digress. 

To this end, the success of the site stemmed from how the objectivity of a stranger makes for insightful conversation, as many used Omegle to “explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties”, writes K-Brooks. But it yielded sometimes uncomfortable, often bigoted results. “Talk to strangers” was Omegle’s slogan, mission and un/fortunately, its downfall. 

All that said, I will mourn the death of Omegle’s global village”. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s number theory tells us the human brain can allegedly only handle really knowing 150 people, on average. Omegle obliterated that. Though the answer here is that there is a moral imperative for a moderated, respectful online environment, beyond that, we must reflect on the role of the internet in mirroring and shaping contemporary culture and consider the broader societal impact of online interactions. 

And the internet mirrors us quite precisely, and what is meant as a relief turns into a burden. “It is the real us, available for direct inspection for the first time. [...] We see the mundanity, the avarice, the ugliness, the perversity, the loneliness, the love, the inspiration, the serendipity, and the tenderness that manifest in humanity,” Jaron Lanier presciently wrote in 1998. It’s all there in the chatroom, in dense proportions, a sort of sticky concentrate. Where the internet was naively built by millions of people “without need, greed, fear, hierarchy” or outright manipulation, it’s been moved into with all the furnishings imbued with social prejudices.

Words: Janan Jama