You know we have a real problem in our society when these women haven’t been able to come forward with these allegations until the press have contacted them.

If they fear coming forward after being assaulted by someone who is hardly discreet about being a sexual predator, what must it be like for the victims of more outwardly respectable public figures?

These challenges are awful in absolutely every way. It’s hard to think of a more senseless way to go.

Are there any social media “challenges” that are actually funny, entertaining or creative rather than just being unpleasant and/or dangerous?

Yeah, I’m saying they shouldn’t, but plenty of them do. They use geoip or location services to work out where you are and then use that to send you to the local site or the site in the language that they feel is appropriate for that location.

If you’re really lucky they then make it difficult (and sometimes practically impossible) to switch.

Besides the problem you’ve highlighted for countries with multiple languages, you also have immigrants, people on holiday, multilingual people, VPN users… And it’s not great for your SEO either.

The correct solution (as with languages on websites) is to auto-detect but then make it super easy and obvious how to change if the auto detected version is not what the user wants.

Also if any web developers out there are reading - don’t use the user’s location to determine the language/region they want, and especially don’t force it. I have no idea why so many websites do this but those responsible deserve to permanently have small amounts of sand in all their socks.