Why Parents Need to Know About the Sarahah App
It started off as a simple way for employees to speak up without fear of being fired. Saudi Arabian developer Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq created the website to help businesses. By having their employees send in anonymous feedback to their employers. Tawfiq released an app version of Sarahah, which integrated with Snapchat. With so many teenagers on Snapchat the Sarahah app became a Top 3 app in no time. It's fair to say when teenagers are able to be anonymous on the internet, trouble is inevitable.
Teenagers are presented with the opportunity to say anything without any consequences. No Sarahah didn't invent cyber bullying, however it is enabling cyber bulling. A lot of reviews have past users sharing their horror stories. “My 13-year-old sister uses this, and she got a death threat aimed at our 2-year-old brother." other users wrote "As of right now, basically anybody can be sent nasty or degrading messages without an option to report." Some reviews are unsettling, a parent wrote a review saying that their child received horrid racist comments and the anonymous message threatened to lynch the teenager.
This is a horrid version of "Mean Girls" with an online anonymous "Burn Book" Hopefully an Ashley Madison type hack happens and the people behind those cowardly threats and insults are revealed.