YouTube, since its beginning, has been used as a video-sharing website where one can easily upload videos of themselves and search anything from cute cat videos to help in algebra homework, but lately parents and experts have been showing a strong concern for the growing amount of videos posted by adolescents asking whether they are attractive or not.

The videos uploaded are usually from adolescent girls asking their web camera to be honest and tell them the truth if they are “ugly” or not, with most of them looking vaguely distraught and anxious; they expect fellow YouTube members to express the truth, but they instead receive racial and perverted jokes and comments.  

 “Hay guys, just wanted to make a video to see how many … people think [I]'m either pretty or ugly.” wrote sgal901, a young girl, as her video description.

Sidsizzle123, another preteen girl, titled her posted video “Am [I] ugly?????” while writing “please tell me the truth”; sounding desperate for an answer.

The preteen and teenage girls and boys are vulnerable to abuse and harassment from anonymous strangers or “trolls”.

Negative comments such as "You [‘re] not ugly. Actually you [‘re] pretty for a chimp," and “ugly” are found more often than “You're beautiful, hun! Let no one bring you down.”

Others think the girls and the occasional boys – post these videos as a way of getting the attention they want.

Nickieca, British Expat in San Diego on www.dailymail.co.uk wrote “Most of the time it's just over confident kids asking that question fishing for compliments, the down side is their ego's will get hurt when people won't play that game and get nasty and they will then take it to heart, or some weirdo pedo will say something crude and sexual ..which is the biggest worry, because he/she could be a sexual predator and the tween/teen could end up liking that kind of attention without knowing it's all very wrong.”