Momo Suicide Challenge Promoted By YouTube? Instructional Videos Found That Encourage Children To Commit Suicide
The Telegraph reports that there are dozens of instructional videos available on YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter that give out numbers of strangers to kids.
The internet can be a dangerous place, especially for the scores of impressionable unsupervised youngsters who fall prey to risky fads online. In the recent years, parents have had a hard time keeping their children away from dangerous challenges like the Tide pod challenge, Kylie lip challenge and the cinnamon challenge. Even more sinister are the Blue Whale Challenge of 2017 and its successor the Momo Suicide Challenge of 2018, which encourage children to commit suicide. And contrary to popular belief, these challenges have found their way to mainstream platforms like YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter used widely by youngsters. According to a report in The Telegraph, there are dozens of videos on YouTube that “help” youngsters carry out the challenge.
Some of these videos have gained thousands of views and have strangely gone under the radar of these highly-invigilated sites. The site says that some of the videos appear at the top of search results. They give out phone numbers of strangers, encouraging children interested in the challenge to contact them. The website claims that YouTube pulled down one of the videos with thousands of views after being contacted by The Telegraph.
For the uninitiated, the Momo Suicide Challenge is a dangerous online trend that blackmail youngsters with private information and dire harm. A 12-year-old girl from Buenos Aires, Argentina is the first victim of the challenge who was pushed to committing suicide after she was blackmailed with personal information. Here's what parents can learn from the Blue Whale Challenge to counter Momo Suicide Challenge
It’s unclear how these videos escaped detection on social media platforms for so long. Parents should be more vigilant about the social media sites used by their children since these videos make it easier for harmful content to reach impressionable minds. Media literacy is essential both for the parents and the children to get a better understanding of these trends. Parents should encourage their children to speak up and report any such nefarious activities online.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 21, 2018 12:36 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).