Are online "suicide games" real? (With Alex Goldman)
Are online "suicide games" real? (With Alex Goldman)Update: 2025-01-29
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Description
Momo and the Blue Whale Challenge are two trends that targeted young social media users, supposedly challenging them to an escalating series of dares. Were these viral “challenges” actually causing kids to kill themselves, or was it all a hoax? Alex Goldman joins us to trace the origins of these “suicide games,” as well as the fallout that resulted from them.
Our guest Alex Goldman is the host of a great new podcast called Hyperfixed. Find that anywhere you listen to podcasts, and you can find him @agoldmund on Twitter/X, or just Google him!
Catch the extended conversation and plenty of other great bonus content, plus ad-free episodes, by joining our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Use code "PANIC" at checkout to get your first month for just $0.50!
Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: http://multitude.productions.
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- Host: Ryan Broderick
- Producer: Grant Irving
- Researcher: Adam Bumas
- Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad
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Transcript
00:00:00
Hey, just a brief warning before we start.
00:00:03
Today, this episode contains some fairly graphic depictions of self-harm and suicide.
00:00:10
We do it obviously in the name of journalism.
00:00:13
We're trying to get to the bottom of a story, but some of these things are unavoidable to talk about just a heads up before we start.
00:00:20
(upbeat music)
00:00:21
All right, I am recording my local now.
00:00:23
Great, it looks good.
00:00:25
I am also recording locally.
00:00:26
So, we're professional.
00:00:28
See, you've done this a couple of times before.
00:00:30
All right.
00:00:30
Thank you.
00:00:31
Alex Goldman.
00:00:34
Are you familiar with Kim Kardashian?
00:00:36
Somewhat, I mean, like we never met, but I don't know where she is.
00:00:40
Okay.
00:00:41
I'm gonna read you a message that she posted on Instagram in 2019, okay?
00:00:46
I promise this is going somewhere.
00:00:48
I believe you.
00:00:50
Actually, hold on.
00:00:51
Can I have you read this message that she posted in 2019?
00:00:55
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
00:00:56
Yes.
00:00:57
Okay, I'm gonna put it in the chat.
00:00:58
Here we go.
00:00:59
Parents, please be aware and very cautious of what your child watches on YouTube and kids YouTube.
00:01:07
There's a thing called Momo that's instructing kids to kill themselves.
00:01:11
Turned stoves on while everyone is asleep.
00:01:14
That's in the original.
00:01:16
And even threatening to kill children if they tell their parents.
00:01:20
It doesn't come on instantly.
00:01:23
So, it's almost as if it waits for you to leave the room and comes on mid-show.
00:01:27
It's been seen on Peppa Pig, Loll-Doll, those surprise eggs and a few others.
00:01:33
Continued the post which originated on Facebook.
00:01:37
There's also videos of cartoons doing sexual things, violent things, and they may look innocent enough at first glance, but trust me, they aren't.
00:01:46
Please pay attention at YouTube.
00:01:49
Please help.
00:01:50
You nailed it.
00:01:53
You nailed that.
00:01:54
That was great.
00:01:55
(upbeat music)
00:01:57
What Kim is talking about here is the Momo Challenge,
00:02:16
a supposed suicide game that freaked everybody out for way too long.
00:02:22
And it's the first thing that we're gonna be talking about in this week's episode.
00:02:25
I'm Ryan Broderick, welcome to Panic World, a show about the various witch hunts, moral panics, and viral freakouts bubbling up out of the weirdest, most confusing parts of the internet.
00:02:33
Before we go any further into today's episode, just wanna let you know that we're running a deal on our Patreon.
00:02:38
If you type in Panic, all over case, on a Patreon, you get one month free for 50 cents.
00:02:43
Yeah, I just don't think about it.
00:02:45
It's cheaper right now, go do that.
00:02:47
Thank you.
00:02:47
Joining me today is Alice Goldman, host of HyperFix.
00:02:51
And he's gonna help me try to figure out exactly how real, quote unquote, suicide games like the Momo Challenge and the Blue Whale Challenge are.
00:03:00
So to start, Alex, I've got another link for you.
00:03:02
It's a pretty cool picture of a pretty hot lady.
00:03:06
Can you describe what this character's vibe is like?
00:03:11
Her name is Momo.
00:03:13
Smash your pass.
00:03:14
(laughing)
00:03:16
Oh my God.
00:03:20
Momo.
00:03:23
Have you never seen this before?
00:03:24
I must have, but I don't remember.
00:03:28
Long stringy hair, big bulbous eyes that are kind of like floating in the sockets.
00:03:36
I would say sort of like a late in life, Michael Jackson knows.
00:03:41
It's like very upturned and sort of pig-ish.
00:03:44
And like, almost a beak, like this, that's a,
00:04:11
there's a, I would guess it's a smile, but the smile is way too wide with no teeth.
00:03:52
And then it's got a neck, and then it's just got like a kind of like a chicken body.
00:03:58
It's got, it's human, it's like, or it's humanoid.
00:04:03
It's got, it's fleshy, but it has sort of like a bust and then growing out of that bust are two like bird feet, talons,
00:04:14
but they also have five fingers on them.
00:04:17
It's really hard to describe.
00:04:18
It kind of looks like a combination between like a bird and the girl from the grudge.
00:04:25
It's really unsettling.
00:04:27
It kind of looks like she would have a podcast that was secretly funded by Peter Teele based out of like a loft in China, right?
00:04:35
Yes, yeah, she definitely hangs out at Dime Square.
00:04:38
She looks like she's a moderator for the red scares subreddit.
00:04:42
That's what she looks like.
00:04:43
Yeah, that sounds right.
00:04:45
Here's how Vox described Momo.
00:04:47
It's as if someone combined Voldemort with a bug ad version of the girl from the ring and inexplicably decided her cleavage should transition into oversized chicken legs, which is a detail that you,
00:04:57
I'm, you know, I get that you're a gentleman, you didn't mention it, but she does have big honkers that kind of blend into her chicken legs.
00:05:04
I feel like that's an important detail.
00:05:05
You know, I don't feel comfortable commenting on people's bodies like that.
00:05:10
Oh, I didn't even realize that.
00:05:14
I thought that was just like a lumpy part of the body.
00:05:16
Oh, yeah, she's really stacked.
00:05:18
So Momo's origin story is that she was created by an artist, named S.O.K.
00:05:25
ISO, a Japanese sculptor who worked for a special effects company.
00:05:28
It was created for a Japanese gallery in 2016.
00:05:31
Pictures were taken of it.
00:05:33
And they got posted online most likely via Instagram.
00:05:37
It kind of like made its way around different platforms.
00:05:39
And that was kind of it for a while.
00:05:42
It was just like this creepy thing on the internet.
00:05:45
Until a little thing pops up in Mexico in 2018.
00:05:50
It's a, it's an extremely wild flyer.
00:05:57
And once again, I'm going to have you kind of just broad strokes describe it for the audience here.
00:06:01
What this, this flyer from Mexico looks like.
00:06:06
God, how do I describe this?
00:06:07
It looks if I were to describe this.
00:06:13
So this flyer is hard to describe because it's like bright colors like pastels almost.
00:06:21
It kind of looks like the flyer, my municipality gives me that says like, oh, this is what's recyclable and this isn't except it's all pictures of Momo.
00:06:30
And I don't read Spanish, but as near as I can tell, it's like we want to let you know about a dangerous viral social media thing.
00:06:39
Yes, this is from the Mexican state of Tabasco.
00:06:42
And it was issued by the Unidad de Investigación, de delitos informáticos.
00:06:49
So it's like they're kind of cybercrime, cyber safety unit.
00:06:52
I actually, I went to their office once in Mexico City and I was impressed with how proactive the Mexican police is in terms of like cyber safety stuff.
00:07:01
But this was an alert they had sent out because of Momo traveling around Mexican Instagram pages in 2018.
00:07:10
How did it end up here of all places, the Tabasco Internet investigation unit?
00:07:18
Well, that's a great question.
00:07:19
And when we're going to try to answer today, actually.
00:07:21
And we have a few ideas.
00:07:22
So that same month, the Buenos Aires police report that the suicide of a 12-year-old girl was related to something called the Momo game.
00:07:31
And the Buenos Aires Times is an article about this and here's what they said.
00:07:35
So they say the phone has been hacked to find footage and WhatsApp chats.
00:07:40
And now the alleged adolescent with whom she exchanged those messages is being sought by the police.
00:07:45
They said in their statement and then they added that they believe the teenager's intention was to upload the video to social media as part of a challenge aimed at crediting the Momo game for the suicide.
00:07:55
And in 2018, a bunch of stories like these started popping up.
00:08:00
There was reportedly around six deaths linked to this Momo game.
00:08:07
And I want to focus on the 12-year-old in Buenos Aires.
00:08:11
Obviously, it's a dark story.
00:08:12
It's kind of frightening.
00:08:14
But if you were covering a story like this, what kind of questions would you ask if a police force in a random small town told you, this meme caused this kid to commit suicide?
00:08:27
I would ask how they got that information because generally those stories seem a little fishy to me.
00:08:36
Now, we did a story a few years ago.
00:08:40
I have to reply all about this devious licks challenge, which is basically like this challenge to mess up your school.
00:08:48
It was a thing that school administrators were posting on Facebook being like, you have to watch out for kids doing this.
00:08:55
This is really bad.
00:08:56
They're like challenging each other to vandalize the school.
00:08:59
But no one could find any origin with children.
00:09:03
I mean, yeah, it's really cool.
00:09:04
I wish that it was real.
00:09:05
But yeah, I wish that was real.
00:09:07
I wish that was a real thing.
00:09:09
But there was no origin with children, and there were maybe a couple TikTok videos of kids knocking the paper towel holder off of the wall in their high school bathroom, which honestly,
00:09:20
they don't need any encouragement to do that.
00:09:22
I knew kids who did that when I was in high school.
00:09:24
Right.
00:09:26
And I think Americans are a little more attuned to the way these stories spread.
00:09:30
And they used to be things to things like Black Lives Matter where you had police reports just being published without any sort of questioning by the media.
00:09:38
But for a lot of countries, I think there is sort of this feeling where it's like, okay, the police reported this.
00:09:45
So that's immediately news, and we published their side.
00:09:48
And then if we get around to it, we might figure out what actually happened.
00:09:51
But the police are sort of the point of first contact, especially in certain countries where that is legally required.
00:09:57
In a lot of countries, the media have to be a form of stenography for a police statement, which I think is how a lot of these stories begin.
00:10:05
The police weren't totally useless in this situation though, 'cause we do have some information at least about how the mechanics of this game would work.
00:10:12
Are you familiar with WhatsApp at all?
00:10:13
Do you use it at all?
00:10:15
A little bit, yeah.
00:10:16
So the way many of these police reports in South America were reporting this was that MOMO would be added, like a MOMO WhatsApp account would be added to the contact list of these kids.
00:10:28
And then they would start messaging them and asking them to do like crazier and crazier forms of kind of like self-destructive behavior in self-harm.
00:10:36
That seems to be the major way it was spreading.
00:10:40
- Isn't that just the plot of unfriended?
00:10:42
Have you ever seen that horror movie?
00:10:44
- Yes, yes it is, I'm pretty sure it is.
00:10:46
I have another piece of content here for you to read for us because this is 2018 still where we're still in that year.
00:10:54
And this is a different police branch.
00:10:55
This is a police department from Odisha, India.
00:11:00
Okay, and this is a tweet that they put out in 2018.
00:11:04
- Wow.
00:11:06
Crime branch, Odisha police, that's the display name.
00:11:12
This is the body of the tweet, don't meddle with her.
00:11:15
She is dangerous, dirty and disastrous to your life.
00:11:19
#MOMOChallenge, see detailed advisory here.
00:11:23
Oh, Odisha police, but then there's a link.
00:11:27
- And then what's the image that they included there?
00:11:31
- They include a, what looks like a WhatsApp talk bubble with a sort of cartoony version of Momo's face in it that is right next to a noose.
00:11:42
- Yes.
00:11:43
- Which is a lot.
00:11:44
- It's great.
00:11:45
- It's intense.
00:11:46
- At this period, Momo is spreading around the world via various police tweets and flyers.
00:11:52
As this thing that is praying on kids via usually WhatsApp, it does eventually make its way to America.
00:11:59
And what state do you think in America would be like ground zero for the Momo challenge?
00:12:06
- This feels, I feel like answering this question is going to get me in trouble with the emergence of that state.
00:12:12
I'm gonna say, I'm saying middle America and I'm allowed to, because I'm from Michigan, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say Indiana.
00:12:24
- Unfortunately, there's only one state that routinely and almost constantly has these kinds of things happen there and that is of course Florida.
00:12:32
- I shouldn't, I shouldn't, that was foolish of me.
00:12:36
- Yeah, it's, once you hear it, you're like of course, it's Florida.
00:12:39
And of course, it's the Pasco Sheriff Department in 2018 warning people about Momo by sharing an article from the British tabloid, The Sun.
00:12:49
It checks all the boxes for a story like this, just an incredible snapshot of in time.
00:12:55
I guess like the question I would kind of have for you at this point is, you know, what are, what are the police trying to accomplish by like leaning into this sort of like,
00:13:07
you know, low level internet hysteria?
00:13:10
- That, honestly, maybe I'm a foolish, but I wasn't sure that there isn't necessarily an agenda there.
00:13:16
I mean, to me, it sounds like the way that people are often afraid of the internet, that it's just this incredibly powerful place full of people who can perform dark arts on our children if we're not paying a lot of attention,
00:13:30
like a sort of moral panic.
00:13:31
But I don't know what specifically they would be playing into and I am fascinated to find out.
00:13:37
- I think many of these panics start with a genuine grief, but people become conspiratorial because truly awful things happen and we can't always make sense of them.
00:13:47
But on the other side of the coin, you have teens who are having fun with genuine horror and playing around with dark themes on the internet.
00:13:56
And when those two things collide, the end result is, well, mass hysteria.
00:14:01
By August of 2018, the Momo Challenge is actually like, genuinely spreading online.
00:14:06
It's going viral, as the kids would say.
00:14:09
And largely thanks to a YouTuber with an incredible name called Repzilla.
00:14:15
Take a little gander at the link I just dropped in the chat there and just describe like the general, actually no, answer me this.
00:14:22
Would you trust this YouTuber to tell you about a real thing that's happening in the world?
00:14:26
- Repzilla.
00:14:29
I make videos in the field of entertainment, current events, news, health, and fitness.
00:14:33
- Hell yeah, dude.
00:14:34
- Their most recent videos are Drake.
00:14:36
This is disturbing.
00:14:37
Jojo Siva, the disgusting people who ruined her childhood.
00:14:41
Disgusting woman caught selling self to dogs again, the worst father on TikTok.
00:14:46
What the fuck is this?
00:14:47
- Oh, best part is all of those videos you just mentioned, are tagged as fundraisers, which I think is like a grow.
00:14:52
- It's like a grow check.
00:14:53
- I've just noticed that.
00:14:55
I think it's like some kind of like algorithmic booster he's been put on there.
00:15:00
This guy is not good.
00:15:02
I'm going to just say, my personal opinion is that this guy is not good.
00:15:05
And we found a Reddit thread entitled The Fall of the Pretty Goth Boy, Repzilla, which reads, "Repzilla was a huge catfish.
00:15:13
Repzilla has tweeted things like, "I don't like black people."
00:15:16
And apparently harassed a pregnant, mentally unstable woman.
00:15:18
He constantly throws friends and fans under the bus and always wants to be the victim.
00:15:23
So anyways, this is not like a reputable source of journalism.
00:15:26
But unfortunately, his video about MoMo goes very viral.
00:15:29
(laughing)
00:15:30
Are you surprised by that?
00:15:32
- Yeah, I mean, no, I'm not.
00:15:34
But I guess I'm surprised that he's such a scumbag because if I were thezilla of reputation, I would assume that I would have the best reputation.
00:15:43
- Yeah, you'd think that the journalism ethics of Repzilla would be a better displayed here.
00:15:51
But unfortunately, because of the way the American media ecosystem operates, now there's like a hook that like can start moving its way up the chain.
00:15:59
And that's exactly what happens.
00:16:00
Because right after Repzilla picks it up, we've got Inside Edition.
00:16:06
I just sent you a link to the Inside Edition clip on the MoMo Challenge.
00:16:09
Check this bad boy out.
00:16:10
- The new viral challenge that may have caused at least one person to take their own life.
00:16:15
- Oh wait, they're interviewing Repzilla on here.
00:16:17
- We're waiting for the so-called MoMo game, according to the Buenos Aires Times in Argentina.
00:16:22
- I believe that this needs to be brought to awareness so we can like talk about it and get other people knowing that what exactly they need to look out for.
00:16:30
- Shane Andrews is a vlogger from Georgia who quote "exposes the truth and uncovers the internet's greatest mysteries on his Repzilla channel."
00:16:39
He says he's tried MoMo.
00:16:41
- I was met with some violent images and ex-messages that I cannot show.
00:16:47
But the messages were scary.
00:16:49
They said that they knew personal things about me, which they could not possibly know.
00:16:54
- Because Repzilla is now an expert in the MoMo challenge.
00:16:57
A thing I think he discovered about two days before inside addition.
00:17:01
- I'm baffled by this guy's accent.
00:17:05
Is he Australian?
00:17:08
What is happening there?
00:17:09
He sounds like he's an Australian from Dallas, Texas.
00:17:12
- Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:17:13
It sounds like an Australian Southern accent.
00:17:16
- Yeah.
00:17:17
So this video is probably the thing that really, really blows up the MoMo challenge in America.
00:17:23
It currently has 2.2 million views.
00:17:26
And obviously, it's not super reputable, but it doesn't really matter.
00:17:32
Especially in this point, in 2018, how would you describe the internet in 2018 for people who weren't alive for it?
00:17:38
How would you say it differs from the way things work now?
00:17:42
- People were more credulous about stuff like this.
00:17:46
If they got it from a source they considered reputable, they would be totally down to believe this, I feel like.
00:17:53
And I don't know that people would do that the same way.
00:17:56
- No, maybe being foolish.
00:17:59
- I think the order is different too, where it's like this would be bubbling up on TikTok.
00:18:03
- Absolutely.
00:18:04
- Inside addition wouldn't be the start, it would be like the end.
00:18:08
Like that's when all the media organizations would kind of pile in.
00:18:12
But another example of how this is traveling around at this point in 2018, this is another YouTube video.
00:18:17
So we're gonna watch the first minute or so of this.
00:18:20
So this is a, this is a YouTuber named Sam Gollback.
00:18:24
- I'm gonna try to FaceTime MoMo and see if she's real.
00:18:28
Oh, she read it, she read it.
00:18:30
- I love watching an American try to use WhatsApp.
00:18:34
It's very funny.
00:18:35
- Oh yeah, yeah, he's trying to figure out the basic mechanics of the app.
00:18:39
- I am deleting my freaking number.
00:18:41
Oh God, guys, so recap.
00:18:44
I called it five.
00:18:45
One of them responded in some in Spanish and then kept declining all my calls.
00:18:52
All the other ones were the same exact memo picture.
00:18:54
So obviously they're in use.
00:18:56
Obviously they know what they're doing.
00:18:57
These people are out there making their contact pictures, these scary sculptures, and some of them are texting kids, like me.
00:19:04
- The inability for this guy to understand how WhatsApp works is kind of the only reason this video can exist.
00:19:10
- Right.
00:19:11
Based on the country code, they're based in Mexico.
00:19:14
So he's essentially sending like random English messages to like Mexican WhatsApp users that are just not receiving them and they're getting scared by his own bedroom at the end.
00:19:22
(laughing)
00:19:24
- Depp, can you spoil this video and tell me if Momo ever responds?
00:19:28
- Momo does not respond, no, not in a way that means anything.
00:19:33
But it doesn't mean anything because this video received 2.3 million views.
00:19:37
(laughing)
00:19:39
- Oh my God, that's a, what a different world.
00:19:41
- Yeah, man, I wish I was like a pretty teenage YouTuber that could just make stuff up and go viral.
00:19:47
That sounds like it would be really fun actually.
00:19:49
- Seriously, just saying like I heard Spooky Sound in my room, and no one responded to my WhatsApp messages, got 2.3 million.
00:19:55
Geez, oh, Pete.
00:19:57
- Yeah, but okay, I don't think this is super crazy yet because like, did you ever do like the Bloody Mary game in school?
00:20:04
- Oh yeah, you stand in the mirror and say Bloody Mary five times and you're supposedly, she's supposed to appear behind you and kill you?
00:20:11
- Now, what if I told you you could become a teenage millionaire if you filmed that and then pretended it happened?
00:20:17
I mean, I would do it in a heartbeat, of course.
00:20:22
And this is the problem, especially because like, what we're talking about is very silly, but it is technically serious, you know, to the point where I don't know if it popped up for you, but when I watch these videos on YouTube,
00:20:35
there's like a suicide crisis helping underneath all the videos.
00:20:39
- I did notice that, yeah.
00:20:40
- So it's like, it's this really interesting thing where like what would have been 30 years ago, teenagers just freaking each other out is now become like a mental health crisis on a platform level with like police departments around the world involved.
00:20:54
- Wow, that's a lot, right?
00:20:57
It's kind of tough to parse, I think.
00:21:00
But let's jump back to our timeline because things are going to get kind of interesting here.
00:21:04
So in 2019, in Scotland, a mom named Lynn Dixon tells the Scottish site, The Heralds,
00:21:14
that her eight-year-old son was left terrified last year when he came into contact with the game.
00:21:18
Despite applying strict parental controls to his use of the internet, images of the momo face and her huge honkers, I added that line in.
00:21:26
Popped up on YouTube when he was watching on this prank videos, Lynn said, "It started with him not wanting to go upstairs "on his own because it was dark up there.
00:21:33
"He was terrified, he couldn't sleep, "and we tried to explain it wasn't real, didn't work."
00:21:38
The parents talked to the school and according to the article, it was not the first time teachers that heard of the sinister game.
00:21:43
And then Lynn told The Heralds, "He showed me an image of the face on my phone and said, "She had told him to go into the kitchen drawer "and take a knife out and put it into his neck."
00:21:54
Nothing serious happened here, but an eight-year-old was spooked.
00:21:59
I'm gonna ask you a similar question to what I asked before, which is, as a tech journalist, you know, you're hearing this.
00:22:04
What kind of questions do you think maybe should have been asked in the course of reporting the story that are maybe absent from what you just heard?
00:22:11
- How did he come into contact with this thing?
00:22:14
And I mean, I would like to ask the child a lot of these questions because it sounds so sensational and so ridiculous.
00:22:22
- Right.
00:22:23
There are no screenshots of these messages, included in the story.
00:22:26
There's not really much more to this other than like, a little boy was scared and his mom didn't interview with the newspaper about it, which I would be very embarrassed about if I grew up, to be honest.
00:22:37
- Oh, yeah, I'd be terrified.
00:22:38
That would be mortifying.
00:22:40
I feel like also, my parents once they realized that they were overreacting would still bring it out and be like, "Remember how scared you were?"
00:22:46
You scared us too, and that, you know, I would hate for that to happen.
00:22:51
- I mean, do your kids have smartphones?
00:22:54
- No, my son has an iPad and I'm always kind of looking over his shoulder.
00:23:00
He, you know, all that like terrible shovel where all those games that you get terrible ads for when you're playing other terrible games, he will download and try every single one of them.
00:23:08
And I'm like, you can do that as long as you don't pay for anything and he's like, oh, come on.
00:23:11
So you should do an interview with the newspaper about it and be like, my son, it has a crippling addiction to online gambling.
00:23:18
It's worth a shot.
00:23:21
My daughter has no interest in anything except for sort of second run Nickelodeon shows on Netflix.
00:23:27
So that's really where she's at right now.
00:23:29
- That's good.
00:23:30
I mean, that's fine.
00:23:31
I saw actually a guy once at a concert and he was sitting in front of me.
00:23:34
It was a couple of years ago and he had his phone out 'cause he was like bored by the concert.
00:23:38
It was a Harry Styles concert and he was like with his daughter, so made sense.
00:23:41
And he had all those games you're talking about, all the shovelware games.
00:23:45
And he, he kept hitting the timer for free play on them but he had a folder on his phone of like easily 500 of them and was just flipping through all of them compulsively playing them and then waiting for the timer to go off.
00:23:56
So he could go back.
00:23:57
- Oh my God.
00:23:58
- Yeah, it was, it was sick.
00:24:00
It was, I've never seen it like that before.
00:24:02
- I'd rather watch Harry Styles to be honest.
00:24:04
- Yeah, I mean, he was fine.
00:24:05
He's not my favorite.
00:24:07
He can't write choruses.
00:24:08
Anyways, so okay, back to the timeline here.
00:24:12
Back to the UK.
00:24:14
In England, a school, the next day after this Harold story comes out, post on their Twitter and they write, "Important, we are aware "that some nasty challenges," parentheses, the Momo Challenge,
00:24:24
are hacking into children's programs and they appear midway through kids YouTube, Fortnite, Peppa Pig, so they can't be detected by adults and you should be vigilant about your child using IT.
00:24:37
The images are very disturbing and the image is just the thing that we're talking about, the chicken woman.
00:24:41
- Right.
00:24:42
- This would have been around the same time.
00:24:43
Do you remember the kind of like, abject horror from the adult world around this time where we all discover that like children's YouTube is insane?
00:24:52
- Yes, that I remember very clearly and I remember it being simultaneously a thing that was people just being like, these are weird and unsettling and it's like Spider-Man hanging out with the Joker hanging out with Elsa,
00:25:05
who's pregnant and I also remember people being like, this was also sort of the QAnon era and it was also people being like, this is a front for an international ring of kind of file.
00:25:18
So I like, remember both of those impulses.
00:25:20
- Exactly.
00:25:21
I'm pretty sure that's what's being described here is that like the kids saw like Spider-Man and Elsa and those channels because they were totally unmoderated at this point by YouTube.
00:25:30
No one was paying attention and I think this was sort of a symptom of that larger issue at the time.
00:25:36
That's my guess.
00:25:38
- Got it.
00:25:39
- 'Cause it's perfect sense.
00:25:40
- Right and so the next day is when you get Kim Kardashian putting out her warning about Momo and you also get academic sort of entering this.
00:25:49
So Mary Eiken, she puts out a statement, Dr.
00:25:53
Mary Eiken, who says, as a cyber psychologist, which by the way, I think we should both be referring to ourselves as cyber psychologists.
00:25:59
I think that's pretty cool.
00:26:01
That's like very cyberpunk, actually.
00:26:03
I like that.
00:26:05
- Not to discredit her.
00:26:06
I know, I'm sure she's fine, but cyber psychologist is a cool term.
00:26:10
As a cyber psychologist, she says, my argument is that every abnormal criminal or deviant group can send links online and can target those who are vulnerable such as children.
00:26:18
This behavior encouraging children to harm themselves is evidence of sadistic, if not psychopathic intent.
00:26:23
And then we have the Irish news site, RTE, putting out a story about it, where they're quoting a charity called Cyber Safe Ireland.
00:26:32
And they're saying that children are being contacted by Momo.
00:26:35
This is like full on moral panic around the world.
00:26:40
- But it's just like a part, it's like, if I were a teenager on the internet, I would get a Google voice account and I'd be texting my friends and being like, "It's Momo."
00:26:49
(laughs)
00:26:51
Here's the best part.
00:26:52
That RTE article I just quoted from about Cyber Safe Ireland has a really interesting line in there, buried in there, which reads, "However, the charity said it has not seen any evidence "of cases in which the challenge has harmed children "in Ireland."
00:27:06
(laughs)
00:27:07
- Let's go!
00:27:08
Yeah!
00:27:09
Yes!
00:27:11
Ah, that's so good.
00:27:13
So yeah, we got Kim Kardashian.
00:27:14
We got the entire country of Ireland.
00:27:16
We've got schools across the UK.
00:27:19
Finally, Snopes does look into this and they write, "It may primarily be a product "of bullies and pranksters latching on "to a Hany mechanism to goad and torment vulnerable youngsters "rather than an intrinsic part "of a particular social media challenge."
00:27:37
Also, we should just say, like, internet demons aren't real.
00:27:41
Like, there's no ghosts on the internet.
00:27:43
Like, I feel like we could just clear that one up.
00:27:45
Like, the children aren't being haunted or like brainwashed.
00:27:49
It's not real.
00:27:50
- Yes, it's not real.
00:27:52
- Yes, it's not real.
00:27:53
But I can name you a dozen horror movies in which it happens, but in real life, yeah, it's not happening.
00:27:59
- And the chips start to fall really fast here, 'cause like, once Kim Kardashian calls out YouTube, they freak out so they look into it and then they tell the daily dot at the time, look, we haven't seen any evidence of any children's content on YouTube promoting Momo.
00:28:13
I also think there's a possibility that like, maybe these parents hadn't set the iPad, safety features correctly and these children were just like out in open YouTube, watching Momo videos.
00:28:25
Like, I think it's very possible.
00:28:27
- Totally possible.
00:28:28
I don't have the safety features on on mine and I'm just waiting for my son to see something that will change the course of his life forever.
00:28:35
- Yeah, oh, cool.
00:28:36
You're performing a mild social experiment on your kid.
00:28:39
That's cool, hold on.
00:28:40
I should say, I grew up that way and I turned out fine.
00:28:43
I'm a podcaster.
00:28:44
(laughing)
00:28:47
- I remember when I was a kid, my brother had a VHS cassette of the wall that he watched over and over again from when I was about five onward and that, you know, that probably shaped me just fine.
00:28:56
I'm fine.
00:28:57
I'm fine, everybody.
00:28:58
- Like, pink floids the wall?
00:29:00
- Like, pink floids the wall, which is basically like a long music video full of unsettling imagery.
00:29:05
- That's cool.
00:29:05
That's really cool.
00:29:06
Here's a really good example though of how this whole thing has spread, right?
00:29:12
The way the Momo challenge is sort of getting picked up constantly.
00:29:15
So this is an anonymous mom from West Houghton in the UK who told the Bolton News that she was picking up her kid from school one day and she had been told by the teacher that someone in the school made the children cry by telling them that Momo was going to go into the room and kill them.
00:29:31
And the kids were all talking about Momo.
00:29:34
They all got freaked out.
00:29:36
And then she went on her school's Facebook page and she posted, so I have one frightened little boy and some deep concerns about the kids in the school.
00:29:44
Parent controls are as tight as they could be.
00:29:46
Uh-huh, I'm sure.
00:29:48
And this shit slips right through.
00:29:50
So if you have a child, it would be well worth it to open up a dialogue about idiots online and try to get ahead of this.
00:29:56
And that's all this is.
00:29:57
I really do think it's like parents do not understand how parental controls work on various devices or understand how YouTube works.
00:30:04
And children like to scare each other 'cause children are little demons.
00:30:07
- Oh yeah, totally.
00:30:08
My son actually, one thing that he's been exposed to that he doesn't even let me say the name of out loud is siren head?
00:30:16
Are you from sure you're familiar with siren head?
00:30:18
- I'm not familiar with siren head.
00:30:19
What is siren head?
00:30:20
- It's like a big skeleton with sort of a chronic flesh on it that has two storm sirens for a head.
00:30:27
And it's so unsettling to my son.
00:30:30
And uh, whoops.
00:30:32
- Yeah, I mean, welcome to love crafty and whore beyond your comprehension.
00:30:38
Like it's pretty cool.
00:30:40
To close the loop here.
00:30:43
In terms of the suicides in other countries outside of the US and the UK, the criminal investigation department in West Bengal in India did look into this and they were kind of investigating reports of two teens who commit suicide because of the Momo challenge.
00:30:59
And what they discovered was that it was quote unquote far fetched and devoid of any evidence.
00:31:05
(laughing)
00:31:06
- That doesn't surprise me.
00:31:07
- That sounds right.
00:31:08
- Yeah, that sounds right.
00:31:09
- They went further and they said so far the game has not claimed any victim nor has anyone approached us saying they've even played the game at all.
00:31:17
(laughing)
00:31:19
Which I think is like really great.
00:31:21
It's really nice that all of this was for nothing.
00:31:24
Although there was one real tangible thing that did happen here, which is the original sculptor who made Momo Kaisuke Iso did destroy her.
00:31:33
He said that she was rotting (laughing)
00:31:37
which brings up a lot of more questions for me, honestly, about like what Momo was made out of.
00:31:43
But apparently, yeah, the sculpture was falling apart and he decided to destroy it.
00:31:47
- Oh, so it wasn't a result of the, it wasn't a result of this, this internationally story.
00:31:53
- The sculptor said it was rotten and I threw it away.
00:31:56
The children can be reassured Momo was dead.
00:31:58
She doesn't exist and the curse is gone.
00:32:00
- Yeah, okay, great.
00:32:02
That made perfect sense.
00:32:03
- Yeah.
00:32:04
- So just to recap, a Japanese sculptor took a photo of a weird creepy statue that they made and he got posted to the internet and got shared around the internet and then the police in Mexico claimed that it was haunting children and then it spread to different police departments around the world,
00:32:22
then YouTubers picked it up, then inside addition, then more parents in the UK.
00:32:27
And then at the end, everyone was like, this actually none of this ever happened and then the statue was destroyed 'cause it was rotting.
00:32:33
- Wow, that's a lot of panic for us.
00:32:36
Did we ever find out whether the person in South America actually did in their life, the 12 year old, because of Momo or was it, we know that a 12 year old did commit suicide in Buenos Aires.
00:32:48
We know that.
00:32:50
We spent hours and hours trying to figure out like exactly how real this was and we couldn't find any evidence.
00:32:56
There's just, there's nothing tangible we can point to in any direction, it was very annoying.
00:33:01
But in thinking about how the Momo challenge evolved, we started to look back at previous challenges like this, previous suicide challenges.
00:33:11
And what we found is that the Momo challenge actually follows a very specific kind of pattern.
00:33:18
It was not the first of its kind.
00:33:19
And after the break, we're gonna discuss another suicide challenge, which wasn't as easy to debunk as this and is a lot more complex and a lot more nuanced.
00:33:30
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00:35:09
- I wanna shift gears now and talk about an earlier suicide challenge.
00:35:13
This one's called the Blue Whale Challenge.
00:35:16
And before we get any further, I just wanna let our listeners know that this is gonna be a bit of a darker story.
00:35:21
Unlike Bomo, which was largely silly and kind of dumb.
00:35:25
This one did result in some in some real deaths and we're gonna be talking about sort of how those events played out.
00:35:32
But to start, I mean, Alex, do you have any context here?
00:35:34
Have you ever heard of the Blue Whale Challenge?
00:35:37
- No, this one's totally new to me.
00:35:39
- Oh, really?
00:35:40
Okay.
00:35:41
So the Blue Whale Challenge happened a few years before in 2015.
00:35:44
You know, there's been kind of like, were you a fortune guy?
00:35:48
You can be honest, were you a fortune guy?
00:35:51
- I wasn't really.
00:35:51
I was something awful person and then kind of went straight to Reddit.
00:35:56
- To be clear, you're talking about the website.
00:35:59
Not a descriptor of your own personhood.
00:36:01
You are something awful.com person.
00:36:03
- Bit of both, but yeah.
00:36:05
- But so you probably know the term like an hero, right?
00:36:09
You're gonna an hero?
00:36:10
- Oh, yes, yes, I know that.
00:36:12
That is sort of an internet shorthand for a person who is going to end their own life, which very darkly, if I remember correctly, was coined because someone was going to commit suicide and become a hero,
00:36:25
but they put a typo in it.
00:36:26
And so it's like, like kind of an incredible statement of like, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna an hero.
00:36:32
Like, I'm gonna become an hero.
00:36:34
So like, these things have been around for a long time.
00:36:36
A bunch of lonely people on computers, sort of going each other into self-harm.
00:36:40
It's a decades-long tradition at this point.
00:36:44
But in 2015, the internet was kind of different still.
00:36:47
We hadn't really kind of globally connected.
00:36:50
And do you know kind of anything about like the way Russian internet operates?
00:36:55
Like do you know about like V-contact and stuff?
00:36:57
- Very little.
00:36:58
I know that that's sort of like a Russian Facebook type site.
00:37:02
But beyond that, I don't really know.
00:37:03
So one of the kind of like odd quirks about Russian internet is like they, you know, up until at least the war in Ukraine.
00:37:09
They had pretty much unfettered access to Western platforms, but they had their own that were quite popular.
00:37:14
And V-contact is, is where the blue whale challenge kicks off, which, you know, is not totally separate from the rest of the world, but it is like very isolated.
00:37:21
Like an American is not gonna be on V-contact or what it's called, sometimes VK.
00:37:26
But on VK in 2015, a meme, a trend starts to spread.
00:37:31
And the BBC describes it like this.
00:37:35
Wake up in the middle of the night or watch a scary film, but day by day the task's groom or sinister.
00:37:40
Stand on the ledge of a tower block, cut a whale into your arm.
00:37:44
The final challenge, a demand that the user kills themselves.
00:37:48
And what they're describing is quite similar to Momo, where you know, you would text Momo and you'd get like different escalating challenges.
00:37:56
The blue whale is exactly this.
00:37:59
You'd be on VK, you'd be on V-contact, and you would get messages to sort of like go to you into committing suicide.
00:38:05
- Okay.
00:38:06
- Do you have any thought about why it would be called a whale?
00:38:10
Like, do you have any theories about why it's called the blue whale challenge?
00:38:14
- Honestly, I don't.
00:38:15
I have no clue.
00:38:17
- So there's a couple popular theories, but nothing totally substantial here.
00:38:22
So there's a Russian emo band called Lumen.
00:38:26
- Okay.
00:38:28
- And they have a song called "Burn" and it has like really good lyrics.
00:38:30
Like huge blue whale that can't break through the net.
00:38:33
Why scream when no one hears what you're talking about, which goes hard, actually, I think.
00:38:38
- Yeah, that's pretty spooky.
00:38:39
- Yeah.
00:38:40
- The other theory is that whales are lonely and sometimes when they're really lonely, they beach themselves.
00:38:47
- Okay.
00:38:48
- All right, I guess.
00:38:51
Yeah, that's it.
00:38:52
That's the two, that's the two leading theories here.
00:38:56
But I think the best way to think about it is like Momo versus the blue whale is like Goths and Emo's kinda, you know what I mean?
00:39:06
- Yes, I do know what you mean.
00:39:08
- Yeah.
00:39:09
So the blue whale is like a more intense version of like the hot topic thing that comes later.
00:39:15
And it really kicks off with a 2016 article by Novoia Gazeta, which is sort of like a mildly sensational, but fairly reliable, at least sometimes,
00:39:26
Russian news site.
00:39:27
And I'm gonna send you their first big story about the blue whale challenge.
00:39:33
And if you could just pop that bad boy into Google translate and read the headline for us 'cause it's pretty good.
00:39:41
I mean, it's wild, actually.
00:39:43
- Okay, that's, death groups, 18 plus children are treated systemically and methodically on social networks step-by-step, pushing them to the last line.
00:39:52
How can parents recognize impending trouble?
00:39:55
- Yeah, it's just a story called literally death groups, which is like wilds.
00:39:59
- Death groups.
00:40:00
- Well, what would you compare this tone to with like American publishers?
00:40:04
Would you, I mean, I guess American news sites would publish something like death groups.
00:40:08
And it would have like the big ultra-wide splash image or something.
00:40:12
- It feels like a fox kind of vibe.
00:40:14
- It does.
00:40:15
- It feels like there's like a lot of moral panic stuff or like social panic stuff at Fox or like growing up Facebook groups, basically.
00:40:23
Those are the two things I think of.
00:40:25
- Right, the important thing about this story is that it comes up with a number that was going to be reported everywhere else after this story.
00:40:38
So it claims 130 teenagers committed suicide due to the blue whale challenge.
00:40:46
- Wow, okay, that's quite a claim.
00:40:49
- Yes, it is.
00:40:50
The article reads, people somehow learn to cope with giant radioactive waste dumps, which I think is a Chernobyl reference, but having moved partly to the internet, they brought them here too.
00:41:01
The children follow the adults and mistook the swamp lights for light and lost their way.
00:41:05
They breathe in these landfills and they then pass away.
00:41:10
This dump is a huge community of numerous groups on the social network, V-contact, pushing children towards suicide.
00:41:17
But who are these people?
00:41:18
Spiritual monsters, maniacs, sectarians, fascists?
00:41:22
This is the first question that immediately arises.
00:41:24
And the second, for what?
00:41:26
- Wow, that's really intense.
00:41:29
- I mean, I have to assume this is just how all Russian journalism reads, I think.
00:41:34
I think this is just how you read the news there.
00:41:37
But it's, I mean, this is really sensational.
00:41:40
And the most important thing is that it is claiming at the end of this that 130 children have committed suicide, but the thing that I want to focus on before we kind of get to pulling apart what that number means.
00:41:51
There's a line in here that I find really interesting, which is a huge community of numerous groups on the social network, V-contact.
00:41:57
So I actually recently spoke to a Russian reporter about this 'cause I was asking him like how V-contact worked.
00:42:03
And he said that like one of the fundamental things that a lot of Americans after they picked up this story years later didn't understand is that V-contact, essentially labels interests as groups.
00:42:14
- Oh, so the groups were just people being like, oh yeah, Momo's cool.
00:42:19
It would be like, okay, you see like your interest is blue whale, which from what I understand was like started as like a network of art in like poetry communities.
00:42:28
You would add that interest to your V-contact page.
00:42:32
And then if you committed suicide, it would be as if I, I had a my chemical romance poster in my wall and I committed suicide.
00:42:39
And someone was like, oh, Ryan committed suicide 'cause of he liked my chemical romance and they told him to commit suicide.
00:42:44
- Right.
00:42:45
- That's sort of what's happening here.
00:42:46
Is that children in Russia were doing things that were self-destructive and harmful and they had this thing tagged on their social network page.
00:42:56
- Okay, that's ridiculous.
00:42:59
- Yeah.
00:43:00
The article goes on to say that adults were systematically working with children, getting to know them and slowly leading them to kill themselves.
00:43:08
And then the reporter meets up with a mom of a teenager who committed suicide and they go over the details of her death in a way that is honestly like very,
00:43:19
by American standards, I don't think a news story would do that.
00:43:22
And they get like a bunch of kind of like private details about it and they're all sort of claiming that it's this blue whale thing that's causing it.
00:43:30
- Did they ever say where they got the number?
00:43:33
- We're gonna get there.
00:43:34
- Don't worry.
00:43:35
- We'll get there.
00:43:36
- Thank you.
00:43:37
- So as I said, like these are, it's not even just like one interest.
00:43:41
This is like a network of interests that you can like tag your page with.
00:43:46
And then the way I guess it works in V contact is like if you have the same interests as me, we can communicate wall to wall.
00:43:52
- Ah, okay.
00:43:53
- It's not like a private group or anything as I had it explained to me.
00:43:57
Within this network, there are pages.
00:43:59
One of them is titled Wake Me Up at 420.
00:44:01
Nice.
00:44:02
They've had nearly 240,000 subscribers to it.
00:44:06
And it was mainly used for like posting pictures of your dog or makeup tips.
00:44:11
But as the novoia gazetta article reads, and only then an invitation.
00:44:17
Are you a girl?
00:44:18
Have your friends betrayed you?
00:44:20
Did the guy leave?
00:44:21
Did you often listen to sad music?
00:44:23
Then subscribe to Whales or Swimming Up.
00:44:25
Everything is so cute and seemingly harmless.
00:44:28
And so I guess what it's sort of describing is like, you're in one group.
00:44:31
Then like people tag themselves into this network and then be like, hey, follow this group.
00:44:36
And it's like a, it's like a cutesy whale group.
00:44:39
And then they start like sending you like more and more fucked up like content.
00:44:44
Oh, all right, well, okay.
00:44:47
That's a pretty good bit.
00:44:48
Honestly.
00:44:50
Did you ever get like super, okay.
00:44:52
I don't know how to, there's no tasteful way to say this.
00:44:56
Did anyone ever send you meetspin.com while you're like at work or like at school?
00:45:01
Oh yeah, definitely.
00:45:03
Definitely.
00:45:04
For listeners who don't know what that is, I'm gonna let you describe what meetspin was.
00:45:09
I don't even, I don't, I don't know.
00:45:13
It does still exist.
00:45:16
I just opened it.
00:45:17
I'm sorry.
00:45:18
It is a person engaging in anal sex and their penis is sort of spinning around in a circle and the song right round is playing in the background.
00:45:28
Yeah, and it's got a counter.
00:45:29
So like every time it spins, like the counter goes up 'cause you've gone through them and he spins.
00:45:34
I feel like there were like a, like the early internet, tons of shock sites like that.
00:45:39
There was like lemon party and tub girl and Goatsy.
00:45:43
All those things were just like, it was a thing where like yes, I definitely got sent that while I was at the computer lab at school.
00:45:51
Right.
00:45:52
And like the thing about that period of time was that like because people were sharing different links with each other and they were, you know, our real identities weren't really connected in a public way,
00:46:03
there were a lot of shock sites.
00:46:05
And I feel like 2015 was kind of the last year that I remember, like the last time I remember pranking someone with a hyperlink was like around 2015, 2016.
00:46:14
Like showing someone something really gross or weird.
00:46:18
Right.
00:46:19
Well, I still kind of do it.
00:46:20
But I think there was a cultural shift happening where people stopped doing that as much.
00:46:25
And I think that's kind of what's happening here is like you kind of bait kids into following this like QC art page and then you start getting like weird messages.
00:46:35
So the article speaks to another mother of a daughter who committed suicide and they talk about how the teen, you know, had the symbol of the blue whale challenge like in her bedroom and that the users of these communities like catch on that these suicides are some connected and they like make them a big like meme inside the group.
00:46:54
Which is, you know, I feel like something like you still see on like places like 4chan with like Elliott Roger and stuff, right?
00:47:01
In this kind of situation, like how do you know, like what's the chicken and what's the egg?
00:47:05
You know, like is this the media making the blue whale spread or is it the blue whale user?
00:47:09
Like which side of this do you need to catch on or does it even matter, you know?
00:47:15
The whole like 4chan QAnon thing.
00:47:18
Like I feel like QAnon started as like almost a joke.
00:47:21
Like the first person he was doing it, you know, is like, oh, it's, it'll be funny to say all this stuff.
00:47:26
Because everything on 4chan was like a prank.
00:47:29
Everybody was trying to make each other laugh and like outdo each other in terms of like ridiculousness and offensiveness and so on and so forth.
00:47:34
And then once the normies find it, once the people who like don't have the context of the website find it, that is the moment when it spins out of control.
00:47:45
- Right, you know what I mean?
00:47:47
So I do blame the media and the parents for just not knowing when things are a bit.
00:47:52
- Yes, it is sort of like willful context collapse and like I get it, like if you're kicking me to a side, like and you're then asked by a reporter why and you have the ability to say like,
00:48:03
oh, we was this other thing that like it's like alien entity that came to town and like convinced them to do it.
00:48:09
Like I get the psychology there.
00:48:11
What I don't get is how like no voyagazeta can write this article and then conclude with this line I'm gonna read to you.
00:48:17
We of course could not carefully study all 130 cases of child suicide over the past six months.
00:48:22
But we are ready to name a dozen cases when school children for example took off their jackets before taking their last step out like into the cold to die.
00:48:31
Or to jump before they jumped off a roof or something.
00:48:35
And the reason they note that is because in these V contact groups, there's like one of the lines was like before you jump you must take off your jacket.
00:48:44
Which could be red as like an instruction or it could also just be like kind of an inspirational quote.
00:48:51
Like all of this stuff is so nebulous.
00:48:53
- Oh yeah.
00:48:55
- Right.
00:48:56
- But we will come back to the 130 number.
00:48:57
Remember that 'cause it's very important.
00:48:59
Now though we're in like full moral panic.
00:49:01
It's beginning to spread outside of Russia.
00:49:03
A governor of a Russian state compares the challenge to ISIS.
00:49:07
Remember them?
00:49:08
They were so hot back then.
00:49:09
They might be got a problem now apparently after what just happened in New Orleans.
00:49:16
We're still getting information there.
00:49:17
But back then they were banging back then.
00:49:20
They were they were out of control.
00:49:21
- They were they were banging back then.
00:49:23
(laughing)
00:49:25
- Hey, we're gonna isolate that and use that to promote this episode.
00:49:29
- That sounds great.
00:49:30
- Alex Goldman.
00:49:31
ISIS was banging.
00:49:32
Okay, so it starts to spread outside of Russia.
00:49:36
It goes across Eastern Europe.
00:49:38
It goes to Brazil in 2017.
00:49:41
Two US deaths are associated with the game.
00:49:45
The BBC covers like the death of a 16 year old girl and they write, "It was only later when her family had learned about the blue whale challenge that they realized the significance of the meter high paintings of a whale that she had finished at school shortly before she died."
00:50:00
- Oh, okay.
00:50:01
- That sounds pretty solid, huh?
00:50:04
- Might be, yeah, it's irrefutable.
00:50:06
There might be other reasons for her drawing a whale at school.
00:50:11
I can think of a couple, but yeah.
00:50:13
Yeah, that's pretty irrefutable.
00:50:15
The Washington Post picks it up with the death of a 15 year old and they write, Isaiah Gonzalez's family says their son was definitely involved in a blue whale challenge and was sending friends pictures of the completed tasks.
00:50:26
It talks about satanic stuff and stuff like that.
00:50:28
And my son was never into that.
00:50:31
The dad told the Washington Post.
00:50:33
They blew it off like it was a joke and if one of them would have said something, one of them would have called us, he would have been alive.
00:50:41
The sister added.
00:50:43
- I mean, that's really sad 'cause those parents are trying to find a reason and something to blame for their poor kid, but yeah.
00:50:52
It reminds me a lot of the satanic panic in a way, but almost in the reverse where it's like, even with all of the kind of boundaries that have been broken down with cultures and subcultures and pop culture over the years,
00:51:06
we're still trying to reverse engineer why kids who are in a bad place mentally would gravitate towards darker media and then trying to be like,
00:51:16
that dark media is why they're in a bad place.
00:51:19
I grew up playing punk music and listening to really heavy, extreme music and it felt really good 'cause I felt really bad.
00:51:26
It wasn't the other way around, you know?
00:51:29
- Absolutely, absolutely.
00:51:30
When Columbine happened, all of the discussion was about how doom had caused it and not about the underlying reasons.
00:51:38
Doom was such a, it was like such a hot topic.
00:51:43
I couldn't believe it 'cause it was not even that a game I was really that into and I was just like, why doom of all things?
00:51:49
And it's because they made a doom wad, like a map, a custom map of their school, which like, yeah, sure.
00:51:58
That makes sense that they would do that but that doesn't mean that it was like a training ground.
00:52:03
That was all the media talked about for a long time.
00:52:05
That and Marilyn Manson and I had totally forgotten about the doom connection to Columbine and like that's not doom convincing them.
00:52:12
They had to hack a doom to do that.
00:52:15
Like it's the opposite.
00:52:17
And kind of like with the Momo challenge, now that this thing is beating to spread, many people are kind of bringing up these things that we're bringing up, which is like, does this stuff stand to scrutiny?
00:52:27
So in 2017, Sky News publishes an article where they talked to a college student who supposedly did the challenge.
00:52:33
They were a freshman at a Russian university and they said they were bored and they wanted to see what it was all about, which I think is a really important piece to this, which is like the media covers it, people get curious and they start to like seek this stuff out.
00:52:47
So the Russian student tell Sky News an administrator gave him instructions.
00:52:51
Is there an understanding this?
00:52:52
The person that leads someone through a blue whale challenge calls himself, quote unquote, the administrator.
00:52:57
That's like the term inside the game, got it?
00:53:00
So the admin gives him instructions like, tell me how you want to die.
00:53:04
You should watch horror films all night, which I mean, those two things I do on dates.
00:53:10
Like to me, I'm just like, that's normal for me.
00:53:13
But the college student says they start psychologically manipulating you.
00:53:17
It's very professionally done.
00:53:18
You become a bit of a zombie.
00:53:20
And then he said that as he completed the tasks, the admin would say like, if you complete them faster, you'll become happier.
00:53:28
And then finally they got to number nine, the task number nine and it said, jump from the top of a 20 story building in Moscow.
00:53:35
And that's when his parents intervened.
00:53:38
He bought a plane ticket to Moscow and his parents found out and then they found out that he was like posting a bunch of suicidal content all over VK and they called the police and detained him.
00:53:49
Which, you know, okay, I get it.
00:53:52
I'm glad that they intervened.
00:53:54
And looking back, the student said, I didn't feel like I needed to kill myself.
00:53:58
I felt I needed to complete the task.
00:54:00
I only had this thought in my head that I needed to complete the task.
00:54:04
- You know, I deal with a lot of...
00:54:09
I take one of my kids goes to a therapist and anytime we talk to the therapist about anything extreme he says, they're always like, oh, that's just him trying to express something he doesn't have words for.
00:54:20
And, you know, I tend to believe that much more strongly than people are actually just running around being crazy suicidal because of MoMo or whatever.
00:54:31
- Yeah, I don't think it's this thing where the media we consume, whether it's online or traditional has no effectiveness.
00:54:39
That like we can all agree to the way you can get put in a bad mood by, I don't know, I've done like reporting on terror attacks.
00:54:46
And I know that like, you know, for weeks afterwards, you know, after going to the scene of a terror attack and then coming home like, I don't feel good.
00:54:52
Or even if I'm like watching a terror attack in and from a newsroom, even, like I don't feel good.
00:54:58
Like that is real.
00:55:00
I also think that a lot of times you seek that stuff out because you already don't feel good.
00:55:05
- Yes, that's a really good way to put it.
00:55:07
- Actually.
00:55:08
- Yeah, I think most journalists seek that stuff out because they don't feel good.
00:55:14
By this point in 2017, Radio Free Europe is investigating the Novoia Gazetta article.
00:55:21
They try to track down a bunch of former challenge participants and they find a really interesting detail actually, which is that when you try to leave the game,
00:55:31
you start to get threatened with like extortion and blackmail.
00:55:35
- Huh, okay.
00:55:37
- Yeah, it's actually, it's very interesting.
00:55:38
So one participant received a message saying, your mother won't be able to reach the bus stop tomorrow, which scared this user because her mother does commute by bus.
00:55:48
But I also feel like that's kind of an easy thing to guess in Europe.
00:55:51
Like I feel like most moms commute by bus.
00:55:54
But after that initial scare, according to Radio Free Europe, things petered out.
00:56:00
A dozen or so ex participants told the outlet that they would like fake self-harm for the blue whale moderators.
00:56:07
So they would like find like already posted images of self-harm and like send them back.
00:56:13
- Oh.
00:56:14
- So a lot of the images of people harving themselves were just kids basically pranking the people who were putting these on.
00:56:22
This is where it gets really interesting because it's like everyone involved is kind of lying to everyone else.
00:56:27
At this point, like we're at Pika Staria, people are trying this game because it sounds like cool and spooky.
00:56:34
Now we're getting like genuine bad actors who are coming in to try to like extort you or blackmail you.
00:56:39
One kid said that three of the administrators demanded to be sent 200 rubles, which is around like $3 and he just blocked them.
00:56:48
And then that was the end of it.
00:56:50
- That doesn't seem as spooky as it could be, I guess.
00:56:52
- It starts to feel a little less spooky by this point.
00:56:55
This is also where VK starts to step in and starts banning the hashtags.
00:56:59
- That's smart of them, took them long enough.
00:57:01
- Right, and once again, it's like Momo, where like, you know, the platform finally intervenes because everyone's losing their minds.
00:57:08
Which is, I think probably in this case good, because I mean, unlike Momo, you know, based on what we can see, the Blue Whale Challenge became like a genuine lighting rod for like bad actors who were kind of figuring out that they could use this to be bad actors online.
00:57:21
Like you and I.
00:57:22
- Yeah, actually, like you said.
00:57:24
- Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
00:57:25
- So radio free Europe made a fake account, pretending to be a 15-year-old over the course of a week, they tried to participate in the game.
00:57:33
And here, read through this back and forth here.
00:57:36
This is a short little back and forth from the fake account that radio free Europe was running in one of these.
00:57:43
- Okay, so they get a message from the curator, which it says, you carry out each task diligently and no one must know about it.
00:57:51
When you finish a task, you send me a photo.
00:57:54
And at the end of the game, you die.
00:57:56
Are you ready?
00:57:57
And then the journalist says, and if I want to get out and the curator says, I have all your information, they will come after you.
00:58:03
- Yeah.
00:58:04
- That reminds me a lot of the spam emails people were getting, which were like, hey, recorded you.
00:58:09
We recorded you jerking off and we're going to send it to your family unless you pay us a ton of money in Bitcoin.
00:58:17
- That's exactly right.
00:58:18
And I think I have to wonder how many of these users realized that their VK or Facebook account was attached to their accounts.
00:58:30
So like if they wanted to guess things about your life, they could just use that.
00:58:34
- Right.
00:58:35
- Right?
00:58:36
In this instance, the radio free Europe fake account was told to scratch the symbol F-58 into their arm.
00:58:43
And so they just photoshopped it and then they got blocked.
00:58:47
(laughing)
00:58:48
Which I think is kind of funny.
00:58:50
- That is pretty funny.
00:58:51
- You were curious about the 130 number, which I think is the big thing.
00:58:55
How did this happen?
00:58:57
The BBC eventually went back and tried to like re-report all the Novoia Gazetta stuff.
00:59:05
They spoke to a Russian journalist who said the idea of 130 deaths kind of all stemmed from one grieving father.
00:59:12
- Interesting.
00:59:13
- Yeah.
00:59:14
So his name is Sergei Pestoff.
00:59:17
His daughter committed suicide in 2015.
00:59:19
And as the BBC writes, he and his wife founded an organization called Saving Children from Cybercrime.
00:59:24
They produced a brochure and implied that foreign intelligence might be to blame for their daughter's death.
00:59:29
And that operatives were destroying the Russian people by inciting their children to suicide.
00:59:33
He used media sources and open sources to count a bunch of cases all over Russia, which were in his opinion connected to suicide groups.
00:59:42
And that number was 130.
00:59:45
- Yeah, I mean, it's just a bunch of, it's like this very sort of, it's this circular thing where everyone is lending legitimacy to everyone else by repeating things that they just find somewhere.
00:59:55
- Right.
00:59:56
Which if you finally get to the very bottom of it, it's like a dad who just counted all the suicides in Russia in a given period.
01:00:02
And was like, yeah, this all looks right to me.
01:00:04
Read my brochures.
01:00:05
- Which, this is all blue whale.
01:00:07
- I don't wanna dunk on this guy.
01:00:08
Cause like I said, I understand that the tough thing about these stories is that everyone is operating from like a very emotional place.
01:00:19
- Right.
01:00:20
I know that I can't imagine being super rational if one of my kids died from suicide.
01:00:24
Like I can imagine, I can imagine thinking that I am doing something important or thinking that just repeating that number is allowing me to do something important.
01:00:36
It gives people a sense of agency when they feel helpless.
01:00:38
- Right, exactly.
01:00:40
The BBC's conclusion on all this comes from an interview they did with Exandra Archipolva, a professor in folklore studies at the Russian State University for Humanities.
01:00:50
And when her and her colleagues entered these groups that were supposed to be part of the blue whale challenge, they found a very important detail that we have not covered yet.
01:00:59
Which is that.
01:01:00
- Okay.
01:01:00
- The curators, as these people are called, like the administrators of the game, they were around 12 to 14 years old.
01:01:08
- Oh my God, how did they even find that out?
01:01:09
Just by looking at their VK profiles?
01:01:11
- Ah, seems like it.
01:01:13
The BBC writes, far from being manipulative adults, all the curators seem to be kids who had read or heard about the game.
01:01:20
In fact, Archipolva's research suggests the challenge might not have ever really existed in a substantial way before the Novoia Gazetta article was published.
01:01:30
- That's crazy.
01:01:31
And that's the same thing with that devious licks challenge.
01:01:34
It's like the warnings about the problem create the problem.
01:01:39
- Right.
01:01:40
It's totally circular logic.
01:01:42
Everyone involved is like trying to make sense of this thing that is not something you can really make sense of.
01:01:49
Like in this case, suicide is one of those things where I think there's just a desperate need for answers that do not exist.
01:01:56
In most cases, right?
01:01:58
So yeah, at this point, it feels not real, but this did lead to arrests.
01:02:05
And after the break, we're gonna be talking about people who actually did go to prison because of the blue whale challenge.
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01:04:11
- Okay, so the big question is, if this was just a big moral panic, a classic viral frenzy, why were people arrested?
01:04:17
So Ilya Zittarov was a 26 year old mailman and he was found guilty of operating a group of death.
01:04:25
His conversations were with a 14 year old who was discovered after the girl had ingested poison.
01:04:31
And she had been receiving death threats after refusing to kill herself.
01:04:34
But she lived.
01:04:36
The Russian officials said 32 other minors were members of the same online group and may have been receiving similar messages and he was sentenced to three years in a penal colony.
01:04:46
And he was not the only one.
01:04:47
There was a whole bunch of these.
01:04:49
In 2016, there was a guy who was 21 when he was arrested and he was sentenced to three years in jail for inciting two teens to kill themselves.
01:04:57
- And these are all blue whale challenge people?
01:05:00
- Well, it's death groups, according to police statements in Russia, that's the thing.
01:05:04
It's off of it.
01:05:07
- Yeah, I mean, one could argue this is a grooming story or this is a cyber bullying story.
01:05:13
- Right.
01:05:14
- The member of the teenage girl who kind of became the symbol of the blue whale challenge.
01:05:19
- Yes.
01:05:19
- Yes.
01:05:20
So one of these guys took credit for that.
01:05:24
And he did an interview.
01:05:26
His name was Philip Boudikin.
01:05:29
And he was asked why.
01:05:32
And he said that she was a secretarian.
01:05:34
Have you ever heard this term before?
01:05:36
- No.
01:05:37
- So this is fascinating.
01:05:38
This is, in Russia, a secretarian is a member of a grouper people that general society doesn't look upon favorably, like a cult member or someone who's kind of like subcultural,
01:05:49
countercultural, huh?
01:05:52
Weird.
01:05:53
Never heard that word before in my life.
01:05:55
Yeah, he did say a bit more and it kind of reads like the Joker.
01:06:00
He wrote, "There are people and there's bio waste."
01:06:05
And these are those who do not represent any value to society and bring or will cause harm to society.
01:06:13
I cleanse our society of such people.
01:06:15
- Oh, okay.
01:06:17
I see.
01:06:18
So yes.
01:06:19
- He's like a vigilante, but like a vigilante that doesn't really have a point of view.
01:06:22
He just is vigilante wanting to harm others?
01:06:27
- Well, hold on.
01:06:28
You might notice a theme here really, really soon.
01:06:30
So he went on to say on February 17th, 2016, I met a girl.
01:06:36
She suffered.
01:06:37
We started talking and went on Skype.
01:06:39
In the second session, I put her into a trance and started learning about what she was doing and I didn't like it at all.
01:06:45
I decided that well, I need to get rid of such people.
01:06:48
I don't like people who bring pain to other people or harm to society, she was a satanist.
01:06:54
So this is made up.
01:06:56
- This person's making this up.
01:06:58
- Well, I think that's one interpretation.
01:07:00
I also think there's like a version of this.
01:07:03
Okay.
01:07:04
Knowing everything we know now, 10 years later, I think it's actually quite possible that there were genuine art communities, maybe with a blue,
01:07:14
like the blue whale symbol goes viral.
01:07:16
We know that there were these groups on VK, right?
01:07:20
They become like a hot area for teens to communicate.
01:07:24
And you get the normal creeps and in cells and cyberbullies and extortionists that go to every single, like these people are on hobo hotel.
01:07:35
They were on like club penguin, like they're hosting Twitch streams with a fake mustache and sunglasses, if you know what I mean.
01:07:42
- I do, I can't imagine.
01:07:45
- Throughout history, even before the internet, if you put enough children in one place unsupervised, like a bunch of bad actors and creeps are gonna show up.
01:07:53
And I think that there is a version of the story where we are like kind of just talking about like proto-russian in cells.
01:07:59
- Ah, that makes perfect sense.
01:08:02
That makes perfect sense.
01:08:04
To me, that all sounds very fantastical.
01:08:07
Like, oh, I had to take like the Joker language, but then I guess, I don't know.
01:08:12
I guess that that is also the way in cells talk.
01:08:15
So that makes it very reasonable but that's possible, but that's what's going on.
01:08:19
- Yeah, 'cause you have to remember, like, in cells are the Joker of our world, you know?
01:08:25
For them, the Joker's not funny, he's just normal.
01:08:28
He's not scared.
01:08:29
- Yeah.
01:08:30
- Right.
01:08:31
The Joker's just what they're like.
01:08:32
(laughing)
01:08:33
- Yeah, that's right.
01:08:35
As for the 130 number that was reported in the initial article, like the thing that everyone kind of hangs on to, Philip Butiken took credit for the 130 number.
01:08:43
He did say that the piece was pathetic and kind of poorly written.
01:08:48
But this is what he said.
01:08:48
He said, "Perhaps the death of the 130th teenager "is attributed to me because the idea suddenly "became some kind of trend.
01:08:56
"A lot of imitators have appeared, "which by the way really infuriates me.
01:09:00
"Because of all of this, such a wild noise arose "that we had to stop for a while."
01:09:05
- Hmm, okay.
01:09:07
- Which is not true.
01:09:08
Because in fact, actually more people got in on the game after the article, and in fact, possibly him as well.
01:09:14
- Yeah.
01:09:15
- Again, it just feels like everybody taking credit for QAnon.
01:09:18
You know what I mean?
01:09:19
Like all the people who are like, "No, I'm QAnon."
01:09:21
- Right.
01:09:22
- Or I'm Satoshi Nakamoto.
01:09:23
All those people are just like, I don't know.
01:09:25
It kind of has the same vibe to me.
01:09:27
- Satoshi Nakamoto is a really good example of this, where it's like this thing that happened right before the mainstreaming of the internet.
01:09:35
- Right.
01:09:35
- QAnon could not have happened anywhere else other than Forchan because Forchan hasn't been paved.
01:09:40
It's still the wild wet.
01:09:41
It's still just like context-free zone.
01:09:44
And I feel like with like social media, especially in Russia, which was like not, you know, it's not as big.
01:09:51
It's just the V-contact is primarily for Eastern Europe.
01:09:54
And I do think that there was this moment in 2015 where like this exact thing could have happened and it could not have happened the way it did a year later.
01:10:01
- Right.
01:10:03
That makes perfect sense.
01:10:04
- So this is kind of where we thought the story would end.
01:10:07
It seems really fake, but some creeps took credit.
01:10:09
Some went to jail, and that was as much as we could find.
01:10:13
But literally the morning, we started recording this, our producer Grant spoke to Sergey Kostarev Kaseo, the reporter from Radio Free Europe, who not only went undercover to play the game,
01:10:24
but has been in touch with Philippe, what are the guys who went to jail and took credit?
01:10:28
And so yeah, we have not to brag or anything, but we have some original reporting.
01:10:33
- Oh wow.
01:10:34
- So here's what Sergey told us.
01:10:36
After that story, Sergey got in touch with Philip, the Joker, the Blue Whale Joker.
01:10:41
- Right, Philip, with the help of a lawyer, allowed Sergey to review legal documents that led to his conviction.
01:10:48
Russian authorities had tried to connect Philip with eight deaths, but only convicted him for two.
01:10:53
According to Sergey, there wasn't even evidence that Philip was in touch with the two he was convicted of speaking to.
01:10:58
- Whoa.
01:10:59
So how did, well, I guess I don't know anything about the Russian judicial system.
01:11:05
- I, for what?
01:11:06
- So here it's quite, it's quite good.
01:11:08
(laughing)
01:11:09
- Now here it's fine, actually.
01:11:10
The court relied on, okay, think of like the most bananas thing for me to say next.
01:11:21
What do you think the court used to convict this guy?
01:11:24
- Oh gosh, YouTube videos, Twitter threads, the Novoia Gazeta article.
01:11:33
- No!
01:11:33
(laughing)
01:11:35
- Just bringing it all right back into a circle.
01:11:37
This is just, this is like, you know the Pepe Silvia meme of Charlie Day, connecting all the red thread.
01:11:46
It's like there's nothing at the center of it.
01:11:49
There's nothing there, it's all gibberish.
01:11:52
- Right.
01:11:53
So the Novoia Gazeta article comes out, Philip does a bunch of interviews after taking credit for stuff, like doing creepypasta stuff, they use all that,
01:12:03
there is no evidence that he communicated with anybody.
01:12:06
According to Sergei, Philip was trolling.
01:12:08
All those quotes, all those scary quotes, they were just, they were just made up.
01:12:14
He thought the whole thing was really stupid and was just kind of like, I'll just say something crazy, which, you know, I would not do that in Russia.
01:12:21
Of all the countries on earth, I would not do that there.
01:12:24
(laughing)
01:12:25
Yeah, I don't think I would either.
01:12:26
He was very, he's still upset about the Novoia Gazeta article, apparently.
01:12:31
But Philip did kind of take accountability for certain things.
01:12:36
So he said that he was in a bad place.
01:12:38
He said, it felt really good to be playing this game with kids.
01:12:42
He was 21 at the time and the kids you speak into were 12 or 13.
01:12:46
And he said, he thought everyone knew was a game, like creepypasta.
01:12:50
And then when the transcripts come out in court, they showed chats where Philip and the players are communicating in a way that he thought was a joke.
01:12:59
And in fact, Sergei told us that he, when he read them, it looked like a joke.
01:13:03
But at this point, when it's into the court system after, you know, years of craziness about this game, it doesn't look funny anymore.
01:13:12
Right.
01:13:13
And this to me just reminds me of what's the called the Robin Hood Hills thing.
01:13:18
And do you know, like the Paradise Lost?
01:13:20
Do you know that documentary Paradise Lost?
01:13:22
Are you familiar with it?
01:13:23
No.
01:13:24
In the late 80s, and I don't know where Robin Hood Hills is.
01:13:28
It's in the Midwest or South somewhere.
01:13:31
Three children, three kids who were around 10 years old were found murdered in the woods.
01:13:36
And they basically went after three metalheads who were friends that who lived in the area.
01:13:43
Oh, this.
01:13:44
I know the story.
01:13:45
Yes.
01:13:46
I mean, I'm pretty sure Stranger Things actually ripped that off for like the last season.
01:13:50
I haven't watched it, but-- Oh, you haven't watched.
01:13:53
Well, it speaks seminal Netflix TV show Stranger Things.
01:13:56
I have, but not the most recent season.
01:13:59
You're not going out and buying Stranger Things Funko Pops and Hellfire Club T-shirts?
01:14:06
No, I will after this show if I need-- Please do.
01:14:10
Yeah, please do that.
01:14:11
No, but no, I know this story.
01:14:12
And you're totally right.
01:14:14
And it's exactly like that, where it's so interesting to me how these moments become like magnets for everyone's particular kind of grief.
01:14:23
And once it starts to snowball, you just like, it doesn't stop until it just comes to some kind of natural stop.
01:14:31
Well, do you know the story of negative land, the band and negative land, and how they got in trouble?
01:14:35
Negative land, they're like from San Francisco.
01:14:38
They do sound collages.
01:14:39
And they've been around for a year.
01:14:41
Cool.
01:14:41
And they did an album called Christianity is Stupid.
01:14:45
And song called Christianity is Stupid.
01:14:49
And they just like cut up tape of a priest saying Christianity so that it said Christianity is stupid, communism is good.
01:14:57
Cool, awesome.
01:14:58
So it's really, really funny song.
01:15:00
And then as promotion for the album that it was on, or maybe the album after it, they put out a fake press release saying that a guy had murdered his family with an axe after listening to it.
01:15:12
And a bunch of local newspapers picked it up.
01:15:14
This is in the mid '80s, probably.
01:15:17
And then as a result of that, they got all of this insane, bad press.
01:15:22
Because this was also around the time that they were, that like, you know, the PMRC was really ramping up, which was Tipper Gores, the explicit lyrics logo on packaging.
01:15:32
And then there was like a whole media circus around it.
01:15:36
And they created an album after that one called "Helter Stupid" that was just-- These guys are marketing geniuses.
01:15:43
This is great.
01:15:44
That was just sound collages based on the audio of people talking about the non-existent kid who killed his family.
01:15:53
Wow.
01:15:53
It just feels like, yes, maybe we're smarter about the internet.
01:15:56
But like, anytime some new media comes along, we're bound to repeat the same problem.
01:16:02
Well, it's funny, because you don't know how right you are.
01:16:05
When we spoke to the Radio Free Europe reporter, he mentioned something that kind of blew our minds, which is that there was a suicide club in Russia that became this big conspiracy and freaked everybody out.
01:16:19
Let's listen.
01:16:20
I read the book about Russian Revolution once with the period between 1914 and 1917, between the first World War, the beginning of the first World War and the Russian Revolution.
01:16:29
And there is a big huge case in Russian Empire about the same sort of suicide club among teenagers based on the Artur Kwonandoyal novel,
01:16:42
you know, with a club of suicideers.
01:16:44
So they were saying that teenagers were sending letters to each other, inciting each other to kill each other, to kill themselves, right?
01:16:50
There was a secret police in Russian Empire.
01:16:54
The fifth, they call it fifth department.
01:16:56
And so this fifth department, the secret police, they started to investigate because it was of public interest, three sides of children.
01:17:04
And they didn't find absolutely nothing.
01:17:07
Oh my god.
01:17:09
Yeah.
01:17:10
Like, we have been doing this for hundreds of years.
01:17:14
But, you know, not to sort of over-explain this, but I do want to make it really clear here that like, we continually reinvent this concept of the suicide game because I think it really does help in this kind of dark way for people to process something.
01:17:33
You know, there will always be depressed teenagers.
01:17:35
And even when we come to discover, they'll be depressed like young adults who are praying on those teenagers in some form.
01:17:41
And if you leave them alone, like, it will metastasize and spread out of control.
01:17:48
And we've been looking at a bunch of different stories like these over the last couple weeks.
01:17:53
And like, the takeaway that I always have with this is just like, I feel like the only way you can slow these things down is on a platform level.
01:18:04
Like, the minute VK starts blocking the hashtag, things actually do kind of calm down.
01:18:09
Yeah, I agree.
01:18:12
And then like, you know, there's also certain kinds of stuff that's been, I think, banned off of Facebook and so on that actually makes a pretty significant difference.
01:18:22
I mean, I feel like, you know, Alex Jones was done once he got de-platformed everywhere.
01:18:28
And that could have happened much earlier, but, you know, people don't want to take that step.
01:18:33
I think everyone's mind immediately goes to like, okay, like, the platforms have to intervene and they're going to tell us that the momo, the chicken with hawkers isn't evil.
01:18:43
And it's like, but no, you could even go like easier with it, which is that like, media used to be organized by, like, what kind it was for many years.
01:18:54
Like, you used to have like different sections of the video store to buy like a horror movie versus a comedy.
01:19:00
Right.
01:19:00
They were magazines that clearly looked bad and were full of nonsense.
01:19:04
And then there was The New York Times that didn't.
01:19:06
But now we're in a world where everything kind of looks the same online because none of the platforms involved want to organize it for us because there's too much of it.
01:19:14
You can easily go and say YouTube is putting a haunted chicken lady in my child's videos.
01:19:20
And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds right.
01:19:21
Yeah, they would definitely do that.
01:19:22
Yeah, for sure.
01:19:24
And it's like, were we talking?
01:19:26
And then, and of course, like, everyone is going to take like the worst wrong example of this because like, there's no incentive not to.
01:19:32
Like, of course, the police in some Mexican state are going to say, stay off the phones because it means that they look proactive or like the grieving parent with like the brochures is going to say, my daughter was killed because of the internet,
01:19:43
not because like there was something going on inside of her that I didn't understand.
01:19:47
Yeah, absolutely.
01:19:48
It's very convenient to find an external something external to blame that kind of tragedy on.
01:19:54
Yeah.
01:19:55
But you know, what was real Slenderman?
01:19:57
Slenderman, Israel, and he's my friend.
01:19:59
Slenderman's definitely, I mean, he's, I mean, it's he's very scary to me.
01:20:04
I actually, I remember the first time I read the Slenderman 4chan post, I was like on a 4chan when it was like happening.
01:20:10
And it genuinely did make me feel kind of sick and freaked out.
01:20:13
I really didn't like it.
01:20:14
So I spoke to the guy who made up Slenderman in 2013.
01:20:20
And I've always wanted to go back to him and be like, because he was sort of like, he was like, I feel what he said at the time was, I feel like Slenderman's manager.
01:20:29
Like, I'm responsible for his reputation.
01:20:32
Is he the same guy who made Marvel Hornets?
01:20:34
No, it's different guy.
01:20:36
And for listeners who don't know Marvel Hornets, you should, by the way, because we talked about it in our Blurner Witch episode with the illustrious David Sims.
01:20:44
But right after the guy Alex spoke to invented Slenderman, this filmmaker on YouTube did this incredible thing that you can never recreate where he made a fake documentary and then hit it all over YouTube in random accounts.
01:20:59
And it was basically showing Slenderman slowly haunting and making this guy go crazy.
01:21:04
And I watched it one afternoon and felt like really upset.
01:21:06
I really, it was really great.
01:21:07
It was so good for people who had like no money and were just kind of doing it on their own.
01:21:13
It was awful.
01:21:14
Yeah, it was amazing.
01:21:15
This guy just like made a couple of Photoshop's and then they really took off.
01:21:20
They were on something awful, actually.
01:21:21
Yeah, wasn't the story like, this is the last photo of a child who went missing and then you noticed Slenderman in the background.
01:21:28
I think that was the lore, right?
01:21:31
So he made this thing and he was like, I feel really responsible for like the reputation of this character.
01:21:36
Like I want him to like people to like him and like feel good about him.
01:21:39
And then maybe 18 months after he did that, there was that like sort of notorious stabbing where those two girls stabbed their friend because they believed Slenderman was going to you know,
01:21:50
take them to their some magical realm or something to that effect.
01:21:54
And I always wanted to ask him like I sent him emails over and over again being like, hey, how do you feel about all this?
01:22:00
But I think he just kind of cashed out.
01:22:03
I think he got some money for this Slenderman movie and that was that.
01:22:08
Whenever anything like that happens, you know, I always assumed that like there was a breakdown somewhere.
01:22:15
It wasn't like the media, the piece of media or content like made people go out of control.
01:22:19
It was like, there's so many off-ramps before something horrible happens.
01:22:24
And I feel the same way about the blue whale challenge and Momo and stuff.
01:22:27
And all of these kind of like creepy pasta games that spin out of control where it's like humans are much more complicated.
01:22:37
And in control, I think of their own behavior than we want to think sometimes.
01:22:43
And so it's like when something really bad happens and we start tracing it back to the internet, it's like, okay, well, let's figure out all the ways that this went wrong before we get to like, they saw a bad post and it made them,
01:22:54
you know, it made them crazy.
01:22:55
You know, Alex, I want to thank you for coming on the show.
01:22:58
Everyone, go listen to Alex's new show, HyperFix.
01:23:00
It's fantastic.
01:23:01
It's lovely.
01:23:02
And hopefully this wasn't a massive, massive downer.
01:23:06
My pleasure was a lot of fun.
01:23:07
I mean, not fun, but I learned a lot.
01:23:09
I learned a lot.
01:23:10
Good, I'm glad.
01:23:11
If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?
01:23:16
I am a Goldmund, A-G-O-L-D-M-U-N-D on Twitter, which I should probably change to something that's more like my name, but, you know, and beyond that, you know, I'm just around,
01:23:27
not hard to find.
01:23:28
If you Google Alex Goldman, you'll find me.
01:23:30
You heard it here, folks.
01:23:32
He's around.
01:23:33
Well, thank you very much.
01:23:36
Thank you.
01:23:36
This was awesome.
01:23:37
If you, for some reason, want more of this deep dark world, and you don't feel satisfied by my own hosting,
01:23:47
I guess, you can go listen to grants interview with Sergei.
01:23:51
We put the whole thing on our Patreon, which, once again, is 90% off until February 8th.
01:23:58
Just use the word panic at checkout in all caps.
01:24:01
And here is a little taste of grants interview with Sergei to see if you feel like it's worth 50 cents.
01:24:09
We feel very confident that once you listen to some hard-working, reporting, some real journalistic integrity, you know, totally handled only by me.
01:24:19
You'll realize where the money should go to.
01:24:22
All right, here's the preview.
01:24:23
So, with the first one, there was proof that she was in contact with, with Philippe, but with the stack on when there was.
01:24:31
She, there were still no proofs, because, first of all, there were several accounts of contact with the same nickname.
01:24:41
Philippe is, right, Philippe Fox.
01:24:43
He was calling himself.
01:24:45
And she was speaking to several nicknames, the person behind those nicknames.
01:24:50
Nobody knows who these people are.
01:24:52
Or if this was Philippe, or if there was some other people.
01:24:55
Or if they're, I mean, we don't know.
01:24:57
Nobody knows.
01:24:57
And Puri, the case material, you wouldn't find this information either.
01:25:01
So, what they said, they said that they think, the investigative community thinks, that Philippe Budeckin was sending similar analogous messages to this particular person,
01:25:12
as he was sending to other people.
01:25:14
And this is why she decided to kill herself.
01:25:19
You see what I mean?
01:25:20
And the, actually, the dialogues with the other kids are really a funny joke.
01:25:27
So, when you read them, you see, obviously, that these are jokes.
01:25:30
Like they say, ah, you have to, I ordered you, you were so weak here.
01:25:34
Sorry, I ordered you to kill yourself.
01:25:35
You have to jump out of the ninth floor, he says.
01:25:38
And the kids in the chat is like a chat.
01:25:40
So, you have many people inside, right?
01:25:42
Some teenager replies, ah, I live in a small town.
01:25:45
We don't have nine stories buildings here.
01:25:46
We only have five.
01:25:48
And he says, well, I would jump from the fixed one.
01:25:51
Otherwise, I will miss, or whatever, do some bad words on you.
01:25:58
How do you call it?
01:25:59
Like a weird curse, you know?
01:26:00
A curse, you know.
01:26:01
I cursed you, I cursed you.
01:26:02
So, they actually were joking with each other.
01:26:05
Like everybody would see that as a joke.
01:26:07
But the investigative committee decided to treat it as a real dialogue, pushing towards the suicide.
01:26:14
And the judge reads it the way the investigative committee reads it.
01:26:19
And so, this is why they put the press in prison.
01:26:23
So, I'm not saying that what he was doing was a nice thing to do to children.
01:26:28
Especially, our kids were like 12, 13, 14 years old.
01:26:31
And the guy was 21 at the time.
01:26:34
So, he was a adult, but then, I mean, there's no proof that he actually was behind any real suicide.
01:26:41
And also, other kids, some of the kids, they were saying during the process, and this, I found also in the case materials, that actually, if there were kids with real problems who were coming to speak to this,
01:26:52
he'd be taken.
01:26:54
He was trying to calm them down.
01:26:56
And he was like, when he was understanding, it's not a joke anymore.
01:26:59
And the kid is really in trouble.
01:27:01
He was trying to sort of, you know, speak normally with this person saying that, okay, life is not that terrible, as it seems on your 13 years old.
01:27:09
Panic World is a garbage day production.
01:27:13
It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumus.
01:27:19
A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show.
01:27:24
And a huge thank you to Kat Rajesk, our lovely video editor.
01:27:28
And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners.
01:27:33
Multitude.Productions/ads.
01:27:35
We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com/panicworld.
01:27:39
And I like to end this episode with an important reminder.
01:27:42
Log off and touch grass while you still can.
01:27:47
[BLANK_AUDIO]
01:27:57
