Is the Chatroulette Webcam Chat Site a Pornography Site in Disguise?

Chatroulette is a new yet controversial web site where strangers from all over the world can chat with each other via webcam. While Chatroulette has been lauded as bringing random individuals together for good conversation and learning experiences, it has also been condemned as a social pornography site.

The process of getting onto Chatroulette is very simple: you go to the Chatroulette site, activate your webcam, and click "play". A random individual is selected and the site begins to display video and play audio. If you don't like the selected individual, you simply click "next", whereupon Charoulette closes down the feed and brings up someone else in its place.

Unlike traditional social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Chatroulette does not have a feature that allows members to form social groups, nor does it organize members by location, interests, or philosophies. The next person who is brought up on the site's webcam display could be a Brazilian man, a teenage girl from the USA, or several college freshmen in Berlin. The individuals could be telling jokes, hosting a dance party, or performing a juggling act. Alternately, as many shocked users are finding out, the individuals on the other end of the computer screen could be sitting completely naked or even masturbating.

However, whether for better or for worse, Chatroulette is growing. Launched in November 2009, Chatroulette reports an average of 35,000 visitors at any particular time. The creator of the site is a 17-year old teenage high school student from Russia by the name of Andrey Ternovskiy. He codes the site himself, and has been surprised, as well as overwhelmed, by its growing popularity. He has also become alarmed at how the site is being used to showcase pornography.

The biggest public concern with Chatroulette is its utter lack of parental control over what children are allowed to do and see while on the site. While Chatroulette does post a disclaimer that only people who are 16 years and older should enter the site, and that pornography should not be displayed, there is no active enforcement of those rules. There is no online prompt to even input a birth date. The only control that a person has over the content being shown is a button at the top of the screen, where one can flag the video chats that are found to be offensive.

There may be several repercussions with such a cavalier attitude towards pornography, especially when it involves children. If legal issues arise over children being exploited or enticed by adults, the site may face severe penalties. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has certainly had its say when it comes to web sites not taking precautions to protect children from questionable sites. Only time will tell if Chatroulette encounters these issues.

Reference:

Chatroulette offers random webcam titillation, by John D. Sutter.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/22/chatroulette.random.chat/index.html