The 'Momo challenge' isn’t a danger to children online. But it sure is viral.
The “Momo Challenge.” By Abby Ohlheiser Abby Ohlheiser Reporter covering digital culture Email Bio Follow March 1 at 8:30 AM If you’re a parent of a young child, chances are that someone on Facebook has sent you an alarming post about the “Momo challenge,” a game illustrated by a disturbing photograph of a woman, in which participants are blackmailed into completing increasingly dangerous tasks. Maybe that post says that Momo is the latest “trend.
That post soon became an article in a local paper. It was then picked up by national tabloids like the Daily Mail and Daily Star. Many of those reports focus on a particularly dark detail from the legend of the challenge: that its ultimate goal is to convince participants to kill themselves on camera. “Suicide game hits Britain,” read one of the Star’s headlines.
Whatever their intention, the person who put up the anonymous Westhoughton Facebook post set off a chain of events that made warnings about the Momo challenge go viral — even if there’s little evidence to suggest that the disturbing prank is popular at all among the kids that concerned parents are now rushing to protect. As New York Magazine wrote in an examination of the latest panic, it’s “a little strange that we’re once again talking about Momo in 2019.
The presentation mentioned the condom challenge as an example of a dangerous viral teen challenge. Educators in San Antonio gave the same presentations for years. But on this date, a local news crew was present. Their report on the presentation was then aggregated by news outlets across the country, who focused in on the condom challenge and deemed it “every parent’s worst nightmare,” “the latest dangerous social media trend” and “trending” among teens.It wasn’t trending.
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