A mobile phone app that targets children, encouraging them to share their school name, age and phone number and to respond to anonymous polls about other students has found its way to the Hunter.
The "W App", built by Berlin-based developer Slay GmbH and formerly known as "Slay Anonymous Polls", encourages teens to anonymously respond to polls ranking each other socially in an apparently "100% negativity-free atmosphere".
Slay GmbH, which owns a suite of other apps promising high schoolers will receive "hundreds of messages" on their anonymous posting platforms, released the first version of W in Australia about six months ago. On Thursday, it was ranking as the top app for social networking in the App Store second only to the new Meta offering, Threads.
But a slew of negative reviews have seen users warning others not to download the app in recent weeks after reports people had received unsolicited "compliments" and invitations from unidentified numbers via SMS.
"The first thing that is sketchy is that they ask which school you go to," one user warned in the App Store, "They also ask for your location, and your phone number, as well as access to your photos ... in the settings there is no option to change (the permissions, once granted)".
The platform has since raised concerns about user privacy and the ethics of encouraging high schoolers to judge each other online.
The Australian social media educator, Safe On Social, said while the app might boast a "negativity-free atmosphere", the organisation had received reports of kids using the platform to target and bully their peers through other social media sites.
The W App, which requests access to location data among other permissions on download, is targeted at teens as young as 13 and claims hundreds of students from the Hunter have already signed on, including 85 from Wickham Public School, 63 from Carrington Public School and 273 from St Francis Xavier's College among others, but the sign-on process makes no attempt to verify the identity of a user creating an account, allowing them to set their own name, age and username before requesting access to their mobile phone contacts and photos.
Once signed in, the app displays a list of students who attend the user's nominated school behind a front page interface that shuffles poll prompts like "Sneaker nerd" and "Posts stories on Instagram but doesn't reply" above names lifted from the user's contacts.
When a name is selected, whether they are a user or not, the nominated person receives a text message from an unidentified number stating that "a friend" from their school had sent them a compliment, with a link to sign up.
Within 20 minutes of creating an account under the name "Reporter N. Herald", and without making any effort to publish on the app, contact or "friend" another user, or invite others to join, I received no less than three unsolicited in-app "compliments" claiming to have come from local female students that included the following prompts:
"When I need a good photo of myself, I ask ...", "I feel like this person is flirting with me" and "Smells so good, you could make a scented candle out of them".
The account has since been deleted.
The Newcastle Herald reached out to the app's co-founder listed as Fabian Kamberi of Los Angeles, but the developer was not immediately available for comment.
"The risk of predators infiltrating this app is off the charts," One Safe on Social test user posted this week, "As a 52-year-old woman, for 30 minutes (before I deleted the app) I was in a random high school group with over 250 students, and I received compliments from students even though my username was "TestRisk"."
The organisation has urged concerned parents to be be mindful of their child's internet activity and to keep a log of any instances of bullying through the app, including screenshots, along with date and time information, to flag with the developer should it arise.
Apps like W, as well as Slay's suite of other offerings including an anonymous and invite-only messaging platform for high schoolers called "No Cap" and another messaging platform "FrFr" where anonymous "friends" can use AI-generated celebrity filters to mask their voice in messages, has raised questions over the past few years about the relationship users have with social media and the impact of a constant stream of validation on teens' mental and developmental health.
Psychologists point to the identity-forging grey areas of adolescence as a time when young people, individuating from their parents, begin asking who they are as adults and become particularly tied to the opinions and validation of others as guidance.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that notion has become amplified in the wake of the COVID pandemic, and its culture of social distancing, as the pathway leading teens away from in-person social interaction in favour of a stream of online validation through social media became ever more appealing.
One 2023 study published in the Journal Current Psychology described the social phenomenon of "FOMO" or "fear of missing out" as pervasive among young people and a potential detriment to their physical and mental health.
Researchers described the feeling as a subcategory of anxiety and involved "a fear of missing out on someone's novel experiences" leading to a craving for external validation.
"The exponential growth of the internet in recent years and the pervasive use of social media have resulted in the increasing prominence of FOMO," researchers wrote, adding that sustained experiences of the anxiety were likely to lead to mobile phone and internet addiction.
Others, meanwhile, have suggested that, in that state of heightened social anxiety, some users' craving for any kind of feedback regardless of its positive or negative tone, is more important than not receiving feedback at all; the lack of response can lead to as much anxiety as even a negative response.
"Always provide kids with a safe place to express themselves and listen to them without judgment," Safe On Social advised in a lengthy post about the app on its social media this week.
"Show that you take their concerns seriously. Listen actively and validate their emotions. Let them know that their thoughts and feelings are important, and that you are there to support them."
