Cases have been reported of players refusing to perform these tasks, resulting in the account threatening to harm the participant's families (e.g., Webb 2018b) or to leak private information (e.g., 2018). When written to, the Momo account shares horrifying pictures and escalating assignments instigating self-harm and suicide. As part of the challenge, adolescents communicate with a WhatsApp account called Momo, which shows a picture of a grotesque sculpture as an avatar. Also, little is known about the challenge from a scientific point-of-view. Again, it remains unclear which incidents were hoaxes or wrongly attributed to the game. To this day, media reports have tried to link the deaths of five teenagers to the Momo Challenge ( 2018 Davidson 2018 Ferber 2018 Kitching 2018 Schneider 2018). Reportedly, the Momo Challenge shared many similarities with its predecessor. In addition to the Blue Whale Challenge, youngsters turned to another suicide game in 2018/2019. In 2019, five medical reports from Italian and Romanian girls were released that confirm a “‘contagious’ quality of the Internet and the importance of epidemiological, psychological, psychiatric, social, and cultural risk factors” for participating in the game (Lupariello et al. In 2018, Balhara, Bhargava, Pakhre, and Bhati presented the first medical report showing self-inflicted injuries of a young boy, who followed instructions presented by a mobile app resembling the Blue Whale Game. ( 2019), who show that social media content in support of the Blue Whale Game spread rapidly to 127 countries from 2013 to 2017. While the Blue Whale Game most likely originated as a sensational hoax by a Russian newspaper (Evon 2017), cyberbullying researchers believe that copycats have since made use of its contagious effect (Adeane 2019 Timm-Garcia and Hartung 2017). During this time, the curators dare their mentees to perform escalating tasks and, ultimately, push them to commit suicide (Lupariello et al. Via mobile applications, the game connects players with anonymous curators, who mentor the vulnerable youngsters over a period of 50 days. Programmed in 2013 by the Russian psychologist Philipp Budeikin, media reports reports state that the Blue Whale Challenge has caused the deaths of more than one hundred adolescents worldwide (Evon 2017 Mukhra et al. Take your life.’ These examples present what vulnerable adolescents are challenged with when playing the suicide-inducing Blue Whale Game (Mukhra et al. ‘Carve a whale on your hand with a razor, send a photo to curator’, ‘Do something painful to yourself, make yourself sick’, ‘Jump off a high building.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |