Guest Blog: A Teen Sounds Off on Formspring.Me

Finally! Any teen in America can find out what their peers think of them with the use of the new website Formspring. The appeal of Formspring is that you can ask questions anonymously. Though it has turned into a place where you can talk trash about people with no consequences. Now it’s as if, since the comment is anonymous, everyone has lost the filter that tells him or her what not to say.I know very few males who use Formspring. The appeal is to females. I think in general girls want to believe that people will anonymously write nice things about them. They suffer from classic ‘good girl’ syndrome as Rachel Simmons would put it. They want to believe that everyone likes them and will write about it on a Formspring.The other appeal is that just like in life when you hear that someone’s been talking about you, you automatically want to know, who said it, what they said, why they said it. Formspring fulfills 1/3 of those questions, what they said.

People use Formspring to say things like, “ur ugly” or “none of ur friends like u and they think ur fat.”

Why would anyone subject herself to that kind of horrible stuff? Well, there’s the idea that someone will feel bad or stick up for you and write something complimentary to defend you. Plus, once you get a Formspring there’s the feeling that you can’t delete it.

I asked my friend "Sarah" why she wouldn’t delete her Formspring after the awful things people were saying. She responded, “Because I don’t want people to call me a p***y. I have to seem like I can take the insults.”

Which leads me to those girls who try to brush off the insults or people who are aggressive back. Many girls try to make it seem like they don’t care about the awful things that are being said about them in order to show that they are stronger than the anonymous insulter.The thing that really shocked me was that a person would anonymously post that a girl was a whore, a loner, that her adopted parents were ashamed of her and that she should kill herself, but that wasn’t even the worst part. What really made me think was when people started to agree.There were over 25 posts telling this girl that her parents don’t love her and that she should kill herself. What scares me about comments like this is that recently a 17 year old, named Alexis Pilkington committed suicide and it is speculated that Formspring cyber bullying was one of the factors in her death.Julia, 16, is a high school sophomore who lives near Philadelphia, PA.