I was probably about 9 or 10 years old when, on a summer night in a friend’s basement, a pal suggested we log onto a website called Omegle.

I’d never heard of it before. But we all crowded around one of our parents’ laptops, our pre-pubescent faces crowding the screen as the website shuffled us through random video chat feeds with complete strangers around the globe.

Some people were kind. Others told us to get off there — something I desperately wanted to do as I cowered out of the frame. One of my friends asked a teen boy with an accent where he was from, and he named a country we’d never heard of before.