The new owners of Ask.fm, the social network implicated in the suicide of 14-year-old Hannah Smith in summer 2013, have sworn to end bullying on the platform, or shut it down entirely.

Doug Leeds, the CEO of once-dominant search site Ask.com, which bought the previously unrelated Ask.fm on Thursday, made the promise in an interview with Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily.

He told reporter Paul Carr that “we’re not going to run a bullying site … If we can’t [fix Ask.fm] we’ll shut it down.”

As well as Smith, whose death sparked a backlash against Ask.fm that lead to an advertiser boycott, Ask.fm has been associated with six other teenagers’ suicides, a factor many observers, including Carr, have put down to the nature of the site itself.

Users of Ask.fm are able to set up profiles which they use to answer questions other members ask of them. While the answers must be given by a named user, the questions can be asked anonymously, which has led to the site being labelled a hotbed of bullying.

Read the Full Article: Source – The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/19/askfm-askcom-bullying

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