MUCH has been said about Momo Challenge, supposedly a social media driven dare as inserted on seemingly harmless videos posted on YouTube and WhatsApp that focuses on children.
In it, a scary looking character with bulging eyes and ear-to-ear grin is said to urge children to harm themselves.
The scare prompted the Department of Information and Communications Technology to form a task force to investigate the matter.
It also led the Department of Education to advise parents to be mindful of the digital activities of their children.
But is it really true? Is there such a thing? Well, not according to Google.
The search engine has already released a statement on the issue, maintaining it has seen no evidence of such at least on YouTube.
It said, “Despite press reports of this challenge surfacing, we haven’t had any recent links flagged or shared with us from YouTube that violate our Community Guidelines.”
But what of the scary image of Momo herself?
Google said, “We’ve seen screenshots of videos and/or thumbnails with this character in them. To clarify, it is not against our policies to include the image of the Momo character on YouTube; that being said, this image is not allowed on the YouTube Kids app and we’re putting safeguards in place to exclude it from content on YouTube Kids.”
Well, according to reports, the image is actually a harmless sculpture called “Mother Bird” as created by artist Keisuke Aisawa for the Japanese special effects company Link Factory.
But with the scare persisting, Google went on to advice: “If you see someone promoting any challenge with an inherent risk or harm, please flag it to us immediately.”
YouTube has also tweeted a similar statement.
All’s well that ends well?
Well, yes and no.
Note scares like these have been going on for some time.
In 2015, reports have surfaced of footage spliced midway into children’s videos supposedly including “Peppa Pig” urging viewers to harm themselves.
Then there’s the so-called the Blue Whale Challenge that surfaced online also in 2015, which, like the Momo Challenge, also encourages self-harm.
Though it’s easy to shrug all these as hoaxes the panic likely wouldn’t have reached its current level had it not been for a past case in Wisconsin involving two 12-year-olds stabbing a fellow sixth-grader 19 times.
Allegedly, they did so in hopes of conjuring the Slender Man, a fictional entity created on the online forum Something Awful for a 2009 Photoshop contest.
The perpetrators supposedly discovered Slender Man on the Creepypasta Wiki. They had believed Slender Man to be real, and had wanted to prove their loyalty to him so they could become his “proxies.”
The case was used as a cautionary yarn defining the power of internet culture particularly its ability to distort reality.
Beware. (NEIL RAMOS)
