According to reports from gullible parents’ organizations, police
departments, and media outlets, Kids on the Internet are spreading memes
featuring an image of “Momo” (actually a sculpture called “Mother Bird”
created by Keisuke Aisawa for the Japanese SFX studio Link Factory)
that includes explicit self-harm and suicide instructions (the
“challenge” in “Momo challenge” is allegedly to get kids to hurt or kill
themselves).
It’s a hoax, though. There are no verified sightings of Momo Challenge
memes in the wild, and this isn’t even the first time this hoax has gone
around; it circulated in September 2018 as well.
As Taylor Lorenz writes in The Atlantic,
this is part of a genre of hoaxes that rely on parental anxiety about
kids’ use of technology to spread incomprehensible cultural ideas, from
the Satanic Panic over backmasked secret messages in heavy metal lyrics
to the “eating Tide Pods” hoax to the fictional deaths linked to the
“cinnamon challenge.”
