This mom took down SARAHAH App from Google play store and apps store.

The word SARAHAH in Arabic means – honesty. The app,  created by Saudi Arabian developer Zain Al-Abidin Tawfiq was called from both Google and Apple store, BBC reported on 26 Feb 2018. Sarahah (honesty), was developed to provide anonymous but constructive feedback for and from colleagues and/or friends but instead, the app encouraged cyber-bullying. The app, which was launched last year had an up-and-down ride since it’s launch and It became an instant success - worldwide over a short span of time and had over 300 million users. The app topped Apple's App Store in more than 30 countries in July.

Just a couple of days ago, Katrina Collins, a concerned Australian mother, caught life-threatening messages on her daughter’s (13 years old) phone through the app. The messages appeared on the Sarahah app, which was designed to allow people to leave "honest feedback" about colleagues and friends. Although Collins' daughter wasn't actually using the app, she saw the messages after a friend downloaded it and showed them to her. The message read - “I hope SHE KILLS HERSELF. Seriously nobody will care.”

Reports say - Because of the anonymous nature of the app, Sarahah has become what users describe as “app breeding suicide” and “a breeding ground for hate”. Tragically another teenager, in the UK, was found hanged early in 2017 after allegedly being bullied on a similar app called Sayat.Me, which was shut down in May. Both the App Store and Google Play have policies against apps that facilitate bullying, harassment or self-harm.

"During The beginning of a global fight against cyber-bullying." Collins’s said - "I have been scared, broken and sick to my stomach ever since I read messages about my 13-year-old daughter including, 'I hope SHE KILLS HERSELF. Seriously nobody will care'," Collins wrote. 

"No parent can stomach this abuse of their children and I cannot even imagine losing my beautiful, sweet girl to suicide. This is why we need to protect our children."

Collins put up a post on online petition site Change.org. She called for the app to be removed from two of the biggest mobile storefronts - Apple's App Store and Google's Play store. The petition accused Sarahah of facilitating "bullying" and "self-harm", and quickly gained nearly 470,000 supporters.

The app was then taken down from both the Apple and Google stores. It seems that the companies took action in response to the petition, although a Google spokesperson said "we don't comment on specific apps" and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

In response, Collins praised the tech giants for taking action and described the victory as the "beginning of a global fight against cyber-bullying."

According to Newsweek, new users can no longer download the app since it does not show up on Android's Google Play or Apple Store searches. However, users who have already installed the Sarahah app can still use it.

Zain-Alabdin Tawfiq, the CEO of Sarahah, has disputed Collins' allegations. He says the decision by Apple and Google to remove the app was "unfortunate", but he is "very optimistic about reaching a favorable understanding with them soon."

The CEO of the Sarahah app, Zain-Al Abidin Tawfiq, argued with Katrina’s accusations of the app promoting violence and self-harm.

Tawfiq assured that the company has upgraded its filtering system, which filters out offensive messages through "artificial intelligence and machine learning" and stops them from reaching their intended recipients. Tawfiq says the offensive word highlighted in Collins' petition "would be picked up by our filtering mechanism and prevented from reaching its destination". He says "as soon as we received this petition, we tried to run [the message] through Sarahah, and it didn't go through."

But Collins says the messages about her daughter "definitely sent", and sent screenshots of the offensive messages to prove her point. She said: "There were no filters at all that picked [them] up. They were all sent".

Since the petition launched, Tawfiq says his company has upgraded its filtering system to use "artificial intelligence and machine learning."

"So basically if someone says kill yourself, then 'kill' is a keyword. But if someone says 'jump off a cliff', then now these robots will be able to detect that and block it as well." Moreover, he also highlighted out that the app is meant for people aged 17 and older.

BBC Trending set up an account and sent the phrases used in the messages to that account. None of the offensive languages got through, although this may be because of the recent algorithm change.

Anonymous apps have been a threat to many teenagers since the trend started. Trolling and offense have risen rapidly with the vast expansion of the business, and so has the international cyberbullying victim rate.

Sarahah is not the first anonymous messaging app to be linked to online bullying. The Secret app shut down after criticism in 2015, and Ask.fm was linked to several teen suicides in 2013.

Another anonymous messaging platform, Sayat.I was taken down by its owners following the death of George Hessay last year. Hessay, a 15-year-old boy from the UK, took his own life after receiving abuse on the site.

If we consider the present scenario, the fault is not in application, it is in people. We must keep an eye on our children that what kind of app they are using and how they are using it. Here we can also say that we lost one kind of innovation but also we saved many innocent lives.