Are you a virgin? Why do you think you’re so cool? Why don’t you kill yourself? Would you ask this to someone’s face? You’ve probably seen questions like these if you’ve been on a site called Formspring. Formspring, (www.formspring.me), is a website that allows anyone to ask anyone any question they want, anonymously or not.

According to the website, “Formspring lets you and your friends ask questions and give answers about anything and everything.” While this is the official description of the site, a much more accurate description would be: Formspring lets cowardly bullies ask questions they know are inappropriate and hurtful, which is why they hide behind the anonymous button.

If you are in fact asking questions of your friend you shouldn’t feel obligated to keep your identity a secret, or even use the Internet to ask. If Formspring really is a “place for friends,” there wouldn’t need to be an anonymous button at all. People saying nice things aren’t going to use the anonymous button because they’re not ashamed of their nice comments or harmless questions.

This takes us back to the Golden Rule: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Or if you do have to say something mean, do it to their face so they know who you are and how you feel. For those cowards who don’t seem to have the guts to call someone out in person, it must seem like the greatest thing ever. They can cause someone all the hurt feelings and new-found self-esteem issues they want without having to take responsibility for it.

It’s not just Formspring that’s the problem. This issue spreads across the entire Internet, from Facebook honesty boxes to anonymous forums on the thousands of sites that exist for teens and young people. Cyberbullying is a real problem, with very real consequences. According to CNN, cyberbullying can cause more severe depression than regular, face-to-face bullying. A study from the Nation Institutes of Health said that a victim of cyberbullying “may be more likely to feel isolated, dehumanized or helpless at the time of the attack.” And these feelings can have a major impact: people who have experienced cyberbullying are almost twice as likely to attempt suicide than people who have not, according to the Cyberbullying Research Center.

What needs to be understood about social networking sites is that they have a horrible impact on a teenager’s mental state. Between home and high school, teenagers have enough to deal with without being attacked or asked horribly uncomfortable questions by some anonymous jerk. On Formsprng, there is, of course, the option of not answering those questions and ignoring them completely, but they still get seen, and they carry the same negative effects as the published ones.

Some people not only welcome extremely personal questions, but enjoy them. If those people want to be asked uncomfortable questions, that’s fine for them, but they have to remember that the Internet is written in indelible ink. Once you post something, it’s there forever, whether you press the delete button or not. It seems inevitable that people will overstep boundaries, so if you don’t want to be harassed and bullied on Formspring the most obvious solution would be to delete it.

But because technology has become a large part of our lives, it’s hard to avoid having accounts on all these websites. Due to the fact that Formspring is on the rise to become almost as popular as Facebook or Twitter makes simply deleting an account a difficult thing to do, especially for teenagers who want to take advantage of social networking as much as they can. Unfortunately, people are very easy to figure out: if you give them the option to speak their mind anonymously, they are going to take advantage of it.