I thought Formspring was bad, but this disturbing new trend of YouTube videos in which young women (and a few men) ask YouTube commenters whether they're ugly or not might be even worse.
"People say I'm ugly, so tell me, am I?" asks the girl above, whose video has 14,000+ views. She received a variety of responses, ranging from the cruel ("your forehead scares me") to blunt ("just get bangs") to wise, at least for YouTube. ("youre not ugly, society is.")
"I have a pretty basic question," this girl says, adding that her friends all tell her she's pretty but that she's not sure because she doesn't have a boyfriend. "You can be honest!" she giggles self-consciously.
"If you think I'm pretty, still comment...just comment...I don't care if I'm ugly or not," This girl asks. She received some truly horrible comments, like "ALL BLACK PEOPLE LOOK THE SAME ..... SORRY IT'S TRUE" and "ur black ofcource ur ugly"
There are dozens of videos along these lines, and nearly all of them are made by teenagers displaying the same awkward shrugs and smiles meant to display an artificial casualness: Go ahead, judge me, I don't care what you think. Leave it to anonymous Internet commenters to make middle-schoolers feel worse about themselves than they already do. How do we get YouTube to make this illegal?