‘MOMO’ THREAT MORE PANIC-INDUCING NEWS STORY

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.”

Momo was perfectly tuned to set off alarms in the mind of any parent: There’s something online that you don’t know about, and it’s about to kill or traumatize your child. Just one problem: There’s little evidence to confirm that the Momo challenge is real. Although multiple deaths are often attributed to the challenge in warnings about it, none have actually been confirmed.

The panic over Momo followed a familiar pattern established by other supposedly viral “challenges” — the condom challenge and Tide pod challenge, for example — that caused a lot of hand-wringing but few, if any, documented injuries. The viral spread of this kind of story may say less about the danger these challenges pose to young people and more about the fear that the internet inspires in parents.

On Feb. 17, a parent anonymously sent in a warning about the Momo challenge to a Facebook group for the town of Westhoughton, England. “I’m deeply alarmed I have discovered when I collected (my kid) today … the teacher asked to talk to me. She said (my kid) had made three kids cry by telling them that ‘Momo was going to go into their room at night and kill them.’” The post contained a description of the challenge and urged other parents in town to talk to their kids about bad people online.

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.

As word of the Momo challenge spread, the Mail followed up with stories advising parents on how to handle it.

As local police stations and parents began picking up on the viral warnings and issuing their own, more legitimate outlets like the BBC also jumped into the fray. And then, the warnings spread to America. A Florida news station claimed Momo was “the latest trend on social media.”

Momo has spread online not as a viral threat to children, but as a panic-induced news topic about a perceived viral threat to children. And like many viral challenges, Momo has spread on kernels of truth about the real dangers of the internet for young children, appended to a repeated pattern of bad reporting on dangerous viral trends targeting children — which often turn out to be not trending at all.

One thing about Momo is true. There is an extremely creepy image of a woman with bulging eyes and black hair who has become a modern monster of online culture, one that has been in and out of the news cycle as reports and warnings pop up about the challenge. But the details that bolster its legend as something parents should be worried about don’t hold up. As The Post reported in September, when the challenge previously made the news, three deaths are often attributed to the challenge, but none of those reports have an actual, proven connection.

Another warning, posted first to Facebook and then reposted to Twitter (where it has tens of thousands of retweets) claims that videos showing Momo are rampant on YouTube and YouTube Kids: “It doesn’t come on instantly so it’s almost as if it waits for you to leave the room then comes on in mid show. It’s been seen on Peppa Pig, LOL DOLL, those surprise eggs, and a few others.” But when The Post attempted to find any of these videos, we came up short. Instead, several popular YouTube videos warned about the possibility of a Momo scare in videos targeting kids. In others promising to show “proof ” the rumors were real, the proof was often less than convincing.

But this warning, too, feeds off some real concerns about what children are exposed to on YouTube. The Post reported earlier this week on parents who were finding disturbing, violent clips spliced into videos targeted to children on the platform. But there’s no evidence that Momo videos trying to trick children into self harm are viral on YouTube or YouTube Kids. If they exist at all, they’re extremely hard to find.