Momo challenge may not be real, but it’s more than a hoax.

THE IMAGE’S CHALLENGE MAY NOT BE REAL, BUT IT IS ALSO MORE THAN A VIRAL HOAX

Released in 2002, The Ring furnished us with a fresh and memorably horrifying rendition of the folkloric vengeful ghost. In that film, Samara, a demonic orphan drowned in a well by her tormented adoptive mother, rose from the dead, via VHS tape, to terrorize the living.

The particulars of the story are less important than the version that has lodged itself in our imaginations: the tape itself, a choppy cut of generically alarming images; the ringing phone, and the voice on the other end of the line whispering “seven days”; the inhuman form crawling out of the television; the waterlogged face peeking out from behind the wall of stringy black hair. The Ring was both horrifying and divergent from its source material, a Japanese book and film series. The third instalment of the American series, Rings (2017), was a minor commercial success and a huge critical flop. For now, the franchise appears to be on pause.

At least officially. Starting last year, and flaring last month, Americans of Ring-watching age became transfixed by another string-haired demon girl menacing the youth: Momo. Like Samara, Momo is said to possess young people through screens. In one rendition of her story, she entrances children with her shocking face and then gives them increasingly morbid instructions, culminating in suicide. Later versions of the story warn that she will appear in the middle of children’s videos to encourage selfharm. There are minor adaptations that describe Momo making first contact through private messages in various apps or through in-game voice chat.

In recent months, Momo has graced countless local news segments, received national coverage as the subjects of viral “suicide games” and even found her way into the consciousness of Kim Kardashian West, who warned followers to “monitor what your kids are watching!”

There are no credible reports of children who have been meaningfully influenced by anyone persuading them to engage with a “Momo Challenge,” or driven to suicide by her likeness appearing in a Peppa Pig video. This hasn’t stopped police departments and school administrators and media outlets from reporting on the phenomenon as a verified and imminent threat, relying heavily on sec- ondhand and thirdhand accounts, via parents, of upset children. It’s also not obvious that any of her imagined targets believe her to be “real,” either.

This panic was followed by a round of more sober coverage characterizing Momo, and the challenge, as a “hoax,” warning adults that they were opening the door to trolls who might enact elements of the myth to get a rise out of people, and that they were themselves exposing children to violent concepts by engaging with the story.

This much is true: The Momo Challenge is a moral panic spreading through new and powerful channels. It’s also true that she is able to entrance people by appearing, jarringly, in the middle of their media, and that disembodied voices command victims up a ladder of misery. And while Momo really is coming for someone, it’s not the children. It’s their parents.

You can learn a lot about Momo by tracing the ways that her myth has been reformulated for the culture in which it is spreading.

A September post by the office of the general prosecutor of the Mexican state of Tabasco warned that people were contacting children as “El Momo” on Facebook. In Argentina and India, where uncorroborated reports have spread suggesting that Momo led to suicides last year, the “game” is said to have proliferated on Whatsapp, a messaging app used widely in those countries, and which, in India, has been credibly implicated in murders by mobs inspired by viral accusations and misinformation.

The Momo that has most effectively captured the imagination of the English-speaking world is said to appear midvideo on Youtube, or even, as Kardashian West warned, on its childproof subsite, Youtube Kids. These websites have been the subject of credible reports about violent and disturbing content reaching children and predatory adults using the platform.

This month, Youtube announced that it was “demonetizing” (withholding ads from) all videos that contain Momo, suggesting attention had made posting videos about her profitable.

The spaces where Momo is believed to flourish share in their tendency to make parents anxious. It’s 10 p.m. — or 7 a.m. or 5 p.m. — and parents do know where their children are: transfixed by their phones or tablets, rapt by Youtube videos made by strangers motivated by ad dollars. Children spending time with screens is commonly contrasted with children spending time outside, or doing some other supposedly more enriching activity, but the shape of the Momo panic is informed by age-old ideas about “stranger danger.”

Youtube is, in 2019, a rare space in which children can roam. It’s also completely commercialized, and, to a parent’s eye, stocked almost exclusively with choppy cuts of generically alarming images. A clip that puts children into a trance and seems to program them to do or say things? That’s not a clip in the middle of a Peppa Pig video — that’s the Peppa Pig video itself. A third party contacting a viewer with instructions to do something in the real world? That’s not a killer pretending to be Momo. That’s how advertising works on Youtube.

Last week, Youtube said, “Contrary to press reports, we’ve not received any recent evidence of videos showing or promoting the Momo challenge on Youtube.” But Youtube isn’t lacking as a source of psychological horror. Screen time is a source of guilt and frustration among parents today, and it makes sense to need to displace these feelings on a face, a character and something, or someone, with evil motives, rather than on the services that actually are surveilling what the kids are up to, to ends of their own. Youtube is where their unsupervised time might include the sudden appearance of a bunch of children chanting “baby shark” over and over again, cursing them, and eventually their parents and the broader culture, with a nightmarish earworm that might have them wishing a shark would wriggle through the screen and eat them alive.

Momo is, as a former colleague and mother of a young child said to me, only half-joking, “the face of a mom who hasn’t slept or showered” for lack of a moment away from a needy child. She is, like all of us, unable to know or grasp what a service like Youtube — or Whatsapp, or “Fortnite” — wants from or is doing to anyone, much less the youngest among us, but who isn’t ready, or able, to take it away completely.

The Momo Challenge may not be real, but Momo is more than a hoax or panic. She’s a pretty smart work of group fiction written in the grip of a pretty dumb panic, an avatar for a collective spirit that is less vengeful than guilty, anxious and angry. She, or her franchise, will be with us for a while.

HANDOUT / AFP / GETTY IMAGES FILES The terrifying image of Momo has been at the centre of a viral hoax, as reports surfaced that children were being induced by “Momo” into dangerous tasks and even self-harm and suicide.