Panic World - Are online "suicide games" real? (With Alex Goldman)

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

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 the guy! 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. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, just a brief warning before we start. Today, this episode contains some fairly graphic depictions of self-harm and suicide. We do it obviously in the name of journalism. 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. I am recording my local now. Great. It looks good.

I am also recording locally. So I'm professional. I see you've done this a couple times before. All right. Thank you. Alex Goldman. Are you familiar with Kim Kardashian? Somewhat.

I mean, like we never met, but you know who she is. Okay. I'm going to read you a message that she posted on Instagram in 2019, okay? I promise this is going somewhere. I believe you. Actually, hold on. Can I have you read this message that she posted in 2019? Oh, yeah.

Are you up for it? Yes. Okay. I'm going to put it in the chat. Here we go. Parents, please be aware and very cautious of what your child watches on YouTube and kids YouTube. There's a thing called Momo that's instructing kids to kill themselves, turn stoves on while

everyone is sleep. That's in the original. And even threatening to kill children if they tell their parents. It doesn't come on instantly. So it's almost as if it waits for you to leave the room, then comes on mid-show. It's been seen on Peppa Pig, Loll, Doll. those surprise eggs and a few others. Continued the post which originated on Facebook.

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. Please pay attention at YouTube. Please help. You nailed it. You nailed that.

That was great. What Kim is talking about here is the Momo Challenge, a supposed suicide game that freaked everybody out for way too long. And it's the first thing that we're going to be talking about in this week's episode. 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. Before we go any further in today's episode, just want to let you know that we're running a deal on our Patreon. If you type in panic, all uppercase on a Patreon, you get one month free for 50 cents. Yeah, I just don't think about it.

It's cheaper. right now. Go do that. Thank you. Joining me today is Alex Goldman, host of Hyperfixed, and he's going to help me try to figure out exactly how real, quote-unquote, suicide games like the Momo Challenge and the Blue Whale Challenge are. So to start, Alex, I've got another link for you. It's a pretty cool picture of a pretty hot lady. Can you describe what this character's vibe is like? Her name as Mo Mo Mo. Smash or pass. Oh my God.

Have you never seen this before? I must have, but I don't remember. Long, stringy hair, big, bulbous eyes that are kind of like floating in the sockets. I would say sort of like a late in life Michael Jackson knows, It's like very upturned and sort of pigish. And like almost a beak. Like this, there's a, I would guess it's a smile, but the smile is way too wide with no teeth.

And then it's got a neck. And then it's just got like a kind of like a chicken body. It's got, it's, it's human. It's like, or it's humanoid. It's got, it's fleshy. But it has sort of like a bust. And then growing out of that bust are too. like bird feet talons, but they also have five fingers on them.

It's really hard to describe. It kind of looks like a combination between like a bird and the girl from the grudge. It's really unsettling. It kind of looks like she would have a podcast that was secretly funded by Peter Thiel based out of like a loft in Chinatown, right? Yes. Yeah, she definitely hangs out of dime square. She looks like she's a moderator for the red scare.

subreddit. That's what she looks like. Yeah, that sounds right. Here's how Vox described Momo. It's as if someone combined Voldemort with a bug-eyed version of the girl from the ring and inexplicably decided her cleavage should transition into oversized chicken legs, which is a detail that you, 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.

I feel like that's an important detail. You know, I don't feel comfortable commenting on people's bodies like that. Oh, I didn't even realize that. I thought that was just like a lumpy part of the body. Oh, yeah, she's really stacked. So, Momo's origin story is that she was created by an artist named Esuke ISO, a Japanese sculptor who worked for a special effects company. It was created for a Japanese gallery in 2016.

Pictures were taken of it, and they got posts online, most likely via Instagram. It kind of like made its way around different platforms. and that was kind of it for a while. It was just like this creepy thing on the internet. Until a little thing pops up in Mexico in 2018. It's an extremely wild flyer. And once again, I'm going to have you kind of just broad strokes describe it for the audience here.

What this flyer from Mexico looks like. God, how do I describe this? It looks, if I were to describe this. So this flyer is hard to describe because it's like bright colors, like pastels almost. It kind of looks like the flyer that my municipality gives me that says like, oh, this is what's recyclable and this isn't. Except it's all pictures of Momo 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. Yes. This is from the Mexican state of Tabasco, and it was issued by the Unidad di Investigation

of Deilitos Informaticos. So it's like their kind of cybercrime, cyber safety unit. I actually 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, but this was an alert they had sent out because of Momo traveling around Mexican Instagram pages in 2018. How did it end up here, of all places, the Tabasco Internet Investigation Union? Well, that's a great question. And when we're going to try to answer today, actually. And we have a few ideas.

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. And the Buenos Aires Times has an article about this, and here's what they said. So they say, the phone has been hacked to find footage and WhatsApp chats, and now the alleged adolescent with whom she exchanged those messages as being sought by the police. 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.

And in 2018, a bunch of stories like these started popping up. there was reportedly around six deaths linked to this MoMo game. And I want to kind of focus on the 12 world in Buenos Aires. Obviously, it's a dark story. It's kind of frightening. But if you were covering a story like this, you know, 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? I would ask how they got that information because

generally those stories seem a little fishy to me. You know, we did a story a few years ago at Reply All about this devious Licks challenge, which was basically like this challenge to like mess up your school. It was a thing that school administrators were posting on Facebook being like, you have to watch out for kids doing this. This is really bad. They're like challenging each other to vandalize the school. But no one could find.

any origin with children. I mean, yeah, it's really cool. I wish that it was real. Yeah, I wish that was real. I wish that was a real thing. But there was no origin with children and there were like maybe a couple TikTok videos of kids, you know, knocking the paper towel holder off of the wall in their high school bathroom, which honestly, they don't need any encouragement to do that. I knew kids who did that when I was in high school. Right. And I think Americans are a little more attuned to the way these stories spread than they used to be thanks to things like Black Lives Matter, where you had like police reports just being published without any sort of questioning by the media. But for a lot of countries, I think there is sort of this feeling

where it's like, okay, the police reported this. So that's immediately news. And we publish their side. And then if we get around to it, we might figure out what actually happened. But the police are sort of the point of first contact, especially in certain countries where that is legally required. Like, 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. The police weren't totally useless in this situation, though, because we do have some information, at least about how, like, the mechanics of this game would work. Are you familiar with WhatsApp at all? Do you use it at all? A little bit, yeah.

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, and then they would start messaging them and asking them to do like crazier and crazier forms of kind of like self-destructive behavior and self-harm. That seems to be the major way it was spreading. Isn't that just the plot of unfriended? Have you ever seen that horror movie? Yes. Yes, it is.

I'm pretty sure it is. I have another piece of content here for you to read for us because this is, this is 2018 still. We're still in that year. And this is a different police branch. This is a police department from Odisha India. Okay. And this is a tweet that they put out in 2018.

Wow. Crime Branch, Odisha Police. That's the display name. This is the body of the tweet. Don't meddle with her. She is dangerous, dirty, and disastrous to your life. Hashtag Momo Challenge. See detailed advisory here.

Odisha police. And then there's a link. And then what's the image that they included there? 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. Yes. Which is a lot. It's great.

That's intense. At this period, Momo is spreading around the world via various police tweets and flyers as this thing that is preying on kids via usually WhatsApp. It does eventually make its way to America. And what state do you think in America would be like ground zero for the Momo challenge? This feels, I feel like answering this question is going to get me in trouble with the denizens of that state.

I'm going to say, I'm saying middle America and I'm allowed to because I'm from Michigan. I'm going to say, I'm going to say, Indian. Unfortunately, there is only one state that routinely and almost constantly has these kinds of things happen there, and that is, of course, Florida. Oh, I should. I shouldn't. That was foolish of me. Yeah.

Once you hear it, you're like, of course, it's Florida. And, of course, it's the Pascoe Sheriff Department in 2018 warning people about Momo by sharing an article from the British tabloid, The Sun. It checks all the boxes for a story like this. just an incredible snapshot in time. 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, you know, low level internet hysteria? That honestly, maybe I'm a foolish, but I wasn't sure that there is necessarily an agenda there. 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, like a sort of moral panic. But I don't know what specifically they would be playing into, and I am fascinated to find out. I think many of these panic start with a genuine grief, but people become conspiratorial because truly awful things happen and we can't always make sense of them. 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. And when those two things collide, the end result is, well, mass hysteria. By August of 2018, the Momo Challenge is actually like genuinely spreading online.

It's going viral, as the kids would say. And largely thanks to a YouTuber with an incredible name called Repzilla. Take a little gander at the link I just dropped in the chat there. and describe like the general. Actually, no, answer me this. Would you trust this YouTuber to tell you about a real thing that's happening in the world? Rep Zilla. I make videos in the field of entertainment, current events, news, health, and fitness.

Hell yeah, dude. Their most recent videos are, Drake, this is disturbing. Jojo Siwa, the disgusting people who ruined her childhood. Disgusting woman caught selling self to dogs again. The worst father on TikTok. What the fuck is this? Oh, best part is all of those videos you just mentioned are tagged as fundraisers, which I think is like a growth tag is doing? Just notice that.

I think it's like some kind of like algorithmic booster he's been put on there. This guy is not good. I'm going to just say my personal opinion is that this guy is not good. And we found a Reddit thread entitled The Fall of the Pretty Goth Boy, Rebzilla, which reads, Rebzilla was a huge catfish. Rebzilla has tweeted things like, I don't like black people and apparently harassed a pregnant mentally unstable woman. He constantly throws friends and fans under the bus and always wants to be the victim. So anyways, this is not like a reputable source of journalism. But unfortunately, his video

about Mo Mo goes very viral. Are you surprised by that? I mean, no, I'm not. But I guess I'm surprised that he's such a scumbag because if I were the Zilla of reputation, I would assume that I would be the best, I would have the best reputation. Yeah. You'd think that the journalism ethics of Rebzilla would be better displayed here. 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. And that's exactly what happens. Because right after Rebzilla picks it up, we've got Inside Edition.

I just sent you a link to the Inside Edition clip on the Momo Challenge. Check this bad boy out. A new viral challenge that may have caused at least one person to take their own life. Oh, wait. They're interviewing Repsill. range for the so-called Momo game, according to the Buenos Aires, Times in Argentina. I believe that this needs to be brought to awareness so we can talk about it and get other people knowing that what exactly they need to look out for.

Shane Andrews is a vlogger from Georgia who, quote, exposes the truth and uncovers the internet's greatest mysteries on his Revzilla channel. He says he's tried Momo. I was met with some violent images and text messages that I cannot show. But the message were scary. They said that they knew personal things about me, which they could not possibly know. Because Rebzilla is now an expert in the Momo Challenge. I think he discovered about two days before Inside Edition.

I'm baffled by this guy's accent. I don't. Is he Australian? What is happening there? He sounds like he's an Australian from Dallas, Texas. Yeah, that's exactly right. It sounds like an Australian southern accent. Yeah.

So this video. is probably the thing that like really, really blows up the Momo Challenge in America. It currently has 2.2 million views. And, you know, obviously it's not super reputable, but it doesn't really matter, especially in this point, you know, in 2018, how would you describe the internet in 2018 for people who weren't alive for it? How would you say it differs from the way things work now? People were more credulous about stuff like this.

If they got it from a source they considered reputable, they would be totally down to believe this, I feel like. And I don't know that people would do that the same way now. Maybe I'm being foolish. I think the order is different too, where it's like this would be bubbling up on TikTok. Absolutely. Inside Edition wouldn't be the start.

It would be like the end. You know, like that's when all the media organizations would kind of pile in. But another example of how this is traveling around at this point in 2018. This is another YouTube video. So this is, we're going to watch the first, like, minute or so of this. So this is a, this is a YouTuber named Sam Goldback. I'm going to try to FaceTime Momo and see if she's real. Oh, she read it.

She read it. I love watching an American try to use WhatsApp. It's very funny. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's trying to figure out the basic mechanics of the app. I am deleting my freaking number. Oh, God, guys. So recap, I called five.

One of them responded in some in Spanish and then it kept declining all my calls. And all the other ones were did the same exact Momo picture. So obviously they're in use. Obviously they know what they're doing. These people are out there making their contact pictures, these scary sculptures. And some of them are texting kids like me. The inability for this guy to understand how WhatsApp works is kind of the only reason this video can exist. Right.

Based on the country code, they're based in Mexico. So he's essentially sending like random English messages to like Mexican WhatsApp users that are just not receiving them and then getting scared by his own bedroom at the end. Deb, can you spoil this video and tell me if MoMo ever responds? Momo does not respond. No, not in a way that means anything. But it doesn't mean anything because this video received 2.3 million views. Oh, my God. That's a, what a different world.

Yeah. Man, I wish I was like a pretty teenage YouTuber that could just make stuff up and go viral. That sounds like it would be really fun, actually. Seriously, just saying like, I heard a spooky sound in my room and no one responded to my WhatsApp messages. Got 2.3 million? Jeez, oh, Pete. 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?

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. now what if I told you you could become a teenage millionaire if you filmed that and then pretended it happened i mean i would do it in a heartbeat of course 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 this when i watch these videos on youtube there there's like a suicide crisis help on underneath all the videos i did notice that yeah 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. Wow, that's a lot. Right? It's kind of tough to parse, I think. But let's jump back to our timeline because things are about to get kind of interesting here. So in 2019, in Scotland, a mom named Lynn Dixon tells the Scottish site The Herald that her eight-year-old son was left terrified last year when he came into contact with the game, 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.

Popped up on YouTube when he was watching harmless prank videos, Lynn said it started with him not wanting to go upstairs on his own because it was dark up there. He was terrified. He couldn't sleep. And we tried to explain it wasn't real. Didn't work. The parents talked to the school. And according to the article, it was not the first time teachers had heard of the sinister game. And then Lynn told the herald, he showed me an image of the face of 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. Nothing serious happened here. But an eight-year-old was spooked. I'm going to ask you a similar question to what I asked before, which is, as a tech journalist, you know, here hearing this. What kind of questions do you think maybe should have been asked in the course of reporting this story that are maybe absent from what you just heard? How did he come into contact with this thing? And I mean, I would like to ask the child a lot of these questions because it

sounds so sensational and so ridiculous. Right. There are no screenshots of these messages included in the story. There's not really much more to this other than like a little boy was scared and his mom did an interview with the newspaper about it, which I would be very embarrassed about it when I grew up, to be honest. Oh, yeah, I'd be terrified. That would be mortifying. 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? You scared us, too, and that, you know, I would hate for that to happen. I mean, do your kids have smartphones? No. My son has an iPad, and I'm always kind of looking over his shoulder. He, you know all that, like,

terrible shovelware, 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. And I'm like, you can do that as long as you don't pay for anything. He's like, oh, come. So you should do an interview with the newspaper about it and be like, my son, it has a crippling addiction to online gambling. It's worth a shot. My daughter has no interest in anything except for sort of second run Nickelodeon shows on Netflix. So that's really where she's at right now. That's good. I mean, that's fine. I saw actually a guy once at a concert and he was sitting in front of me. It was a couple years ago and he had his phone out because he was like bored by the concert. It was a Harry

styles concert and he was like with his daughter. So made sense. And he had all those games. You're talking about all the shovelware games. 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. So he could go back. Oh my God. Yeah. It was, it was sick. I've never seen like that. I'd rather watch Harry Stiles, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, he was fine. He's not my favorite.

He can't write choruses. Anyways. So, okay, back to the timeline here. Back to the UK. 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, 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. The images are very disturbing. And the image is just the thing that we're talking about, the chicken woman. Right. This would have been around the same time.

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? 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, who's pregnant. And I also remember people being like, this was also sort of the Q&on era, and it was also people being like, this is a front for an international ring of men of files. So I like remember both of those impulses. Exactly. 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.

Like, no one was paying attention. And I think this was sort of a symptom of that larger issue at the time. That's my guess. Got it. That makes perfect sense. Right. And so the next day is when you get Kim Kardashian putting out her warning about Momo. And you also get academics sort of entering this.

So Mary Eichen, she puts out a statement, Dr. Mary Eichen, who says, as a cyber psychologist, which, by the way, I think we should both be referring to ourselves as cyber psychologist. I think that's pretty cool. That's like very cyberpunk, actually. I like that. Not to discredit her. I know, I'm sure she's fine. But cyber psychologist is a cool term.

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. This behavior encouraging children to harm themselves as evidence of sadistic, if not psychopathic intent. And then we have the Irish news site RTE putting out a story about it where they're quoting a charity called CyberSafe Ireland. And they're saying that children are being contacted by Momo.

This is like full on moral panic around the world. But it's just like a, it's like if I, 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. Here's the best part. That RTE article I just quoted from about CyberSafe 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. Let's go!

Yeah! Yes! Ah, that's so good. So yeah, we got Kim Kardashian. We got the entire country of Ireland. We've got schools across the UK. Finally, Snopes does look into this, and they write, it may primarily be a product of bullies and pranksters last. on to a hanging mechanism to goad and torment vulnerable youngsters rather than an intrinsic

part of a particular social media challenge. Also, we should just say, like, internet demons aren't real. Like, like, ghosts, there's no ghosts on the internet. Like, I feel like we can just clear that one up. Like, the children aren't being haunted or, like, brainwashed. It's not real. Yes, it's not real. Yes.

It's not real. I can name you a dozen horror movies in which it happens, but in real life, yeah, it's not happening. And the chips start to fall really fast here because like once Kimmer 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. 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.

Like I think it's very possible. Totally possible. 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. Yeah. Oh, cool. You're performing a mild social experiment on your kid. That's cool.

Hold on. I should say, I grew up that way, and I turned out fine. I'm a podcaster. 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, you know, that probably shaped me just fine. I'm fine. I'm fine, everybody.

Like, don't worry. Like Pink Floyd's the wall? Like Pink Floyd's the wall, which is basically like a long music video full of unsettling imagery. That's cool. That's really cool. Here's a really good example, though, of how this whole thing has spread, right? The way the MoMo Challenge is sort of getting picked up constantly. 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'd been told by the teacher that someone in the school made the children. cry by telling them that MoMA was going to go into the room and kill them. And the kids were all talking about MoMo. They all got freaked out. 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. Parent controls are as tight as they could be. Uh-huh. I'm sure. And this shit slips right through. 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. And that's all this is. I really do think it's It's like parents do not understand how parental controls work on various devices or understand how YouTube works.

And children like to scare each other because children are little demons. Oh, yeah, totally. 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 Sirenhead. I'm sure you're familiar with Sirenhead. I'm not familiar with Sirenhead. What is Sirenhead? It's like a big skeleton with like sort of necrotic flesh on it that has two storm sirens for a head. and it's so unsettling to my son.

And, uh, whoops. Yeah. I mean, welcome to like love crafty and horror beyond your comprehension. Like, it's pretty cool. To close the loop here, in terms of like the suicides in other countries outside of the U.S. and the UK, uh, the criminal investigation department in West Bengal in India did look into this and they were kind of investigating reports. of two teens who had committed suicide because of the Momo challenge.

And what they discovered was that it was quote unquote, far-fetched and devoid of any evidence. That doesn't surprise. That sounds right. They went further and they said, so far the game has not claimed any victim, nor has anyone approached this saying they have even played the game at all. Which I think is like really great.

It's really nice that all of this was for nothing. Although there was one real tangible thing that did happen here, which is the original sculptor who made Momo, Kaisuke Isso, did destroy her. He said that she was rotting, which brings up a lot of more questions for me, honestly, about what MoMo was made out of. But apparently, yeah, the sculpture was falling apart,

and he decided to destroy it. Oh, so it wasn't a result of the, it wasn't a result of this international scale. The sculptor said, it was rotten and I threw it away. The children can be reassured. Moma was dead. She doesn't exist and the curse is gone.

Yeah. Okay. Great. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. 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. Then YouTubers picked it up. then inside addition, then more parents in the UK. And then at the end, everyone was like, this actually, none of this ever happened. And then the statue was destroyed because it was rotting. Wow. That's a lot of panic for.

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. We know that. We spent hours and hours trying to figure out, like, exactly how real this was, and we couldn't find any evidence. There's just, there's nothing tangible we can point to in any direction. It was very annoying. But in thinking about, you know, how the

Momo challenge evolved, we started to look back at previous challenges like this, previous suicide challenges. And what we found is that the Momo challenge actually follows a very specific kind of pattern. It was not the first of its kind. And after the break, we're going to discuss another challenge, which wasn't as easy to debunk as this and is a lot more complex and a lot more nuanced. And we'll talk about that right after a word from our sponsors. I want to shift gears now and talk about an earlier suicide challenge. This one's called the Blue Whale Challenge. And before we get any further, I just want to let our listeners know that this is going to be a bit of a darker story. Unlike MoMA, which was largely

silly and kind of dumb, this one did result in some, in some and real deaths, and we're going to be talking about sort of how those events played out. But to start, I mean, Alex, do you have any context here? Have you ever heard of the Blue Whale Challenge? No, this one's totally new to me. Oh, really? Okay. So the Blue Whale Challenge happened a few years before in 2015.

You know, there's been kind of like, were you a 4chan guy? You can be honest. Were you a fortune guy? I wasn't really. I was something awful person and then kind of went straight to Reddit. To be clear, you're talking about the website, not a descriptor of your own personhood. You are something awful.com person. A bit of both, but yeah.

But so you probably know the term like an hero, right? You're going to an hero? Oh, yes. Yes, I know that. That is a 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 like commit suicide and become a hero, but they put a typo in it. And so it's like, like, kind of an incredible statement of like, I'm going to be, I'm going to an hero.

Like, I'm going to become an hero. So, like, these things have been around for a long time. A bunch of lonely people on computers sort of goading each other into self-harm. It's a, it's a decades-long tradition at this point. But in 2015, the internet was kind of different still. We hadn't really kind of globally connected. And do you know kind of anything about like the way Russian internet operates? Like, do you know about like V-contact and stuff?

of? Very little. I know that that's sort of like a Russian Facebook type site, but beyond that, I don't really know. 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, they had pretty much unfettered access to Western platforms, but they had their own that were quite popular. And V-contact 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. Like an American is not going to be on V-contact or what it's called sometimes VK. But on VK in 2015, a meme, a trend starts to spread. And the BBC describes it like this. Wake up in the middle of the night or watch a scary film, but day by day, the tasks grew more sinister.

Stand on the ledge of a tower block. Cut a whale into your arm. The final challenge, a demand that the user kills themselves. 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. The blue whale is exactly this. You'd be on VK. You'd be on V-K. And you would get messages to sort of like go to you into committing suicide. Okay.

Do you have any thought about why it would be called a whale? Like, you have any theories about why it's called the Blue Whale challenge? Honestly, I don't. I have no clue. So there's a couple popular theories, but nothing totally, totally substantial. here. So there's a Russian emo band called Lumen. They have a song called Burn

and it has a really good lyrics like huge blue whale that can't break through the net. Why scream when no one hears what you're talking about which goes hard actually I think. Yeah, that's pretty spooky. Yeah. The other theory is that whales are lonely and sometimes when they're really lonely they beach themselves. Okay.

All right. I guess. Yeah, that's it. it. That's the two leading theories here. But I think the best way to think about it is like Momo versus the Blue Whale is like Goths and emo's kind of. You know what I mean? Yes. I do know what you mean. Yeah. So the Blue Whale is like a more intense version of like the hot topic thing that comes later. And it really kicks off with a 2016 article by Novoya Gazeta, which is sort of like a mildly sensationalist, but fairly reliable, at least sometimes, Russian news site. And I'm going to send you their first big story about the Blue Whale Challenge.

And if you could just pop that bad boy into Google Translate and read the headline for us, because it's pretty good. I mean, it's wild, actually. Death groups, 18 plus children are treated systemically and methodically on social networks step by step, pushing them to the last line. How can parents recognize impending trouble? Yeah. It's just a story called literally death groups, which is like wild. Death groups. What would you compare this tone to with like American publishers? Would you, I mean, I guess American news sites would publish something like death groups and it would have like the big ultra wide splash image or something. It feels like a Fox kind of vibe. It feels like there's like a lot of moral panic stuff or like social

panic stuff at Fox or like grown up Facebook groups basically those are the two things I'd think of right the important thing about this story is that it comes up with a number uh that was going to be reported everywhere else after this story um so it claims 130 teenagers committed suicide due to the blue whale challenge wow okay that's quite a close blame. Yes, it is. 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. The children followed the adults and mistook the swamp lights for light and lost their way. They breathe in these landfills, and they then pass away. This dump is a huge community

of numerous groups on the social network V-contact, pushing children towards suicide. But who are these people, spiritual monsters, maniacs, sectarians, fascists. This is the first question that immediately arises. And the second? For what? Wow, that's really intense. I mean, I have to assume this is just how all Russian journalism reads, I think. I think this is just how you write the news there. But it's, I mean, this is really sensational. 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. 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. So I actually recently spoke to a Russian reporter about this because I was asking him how V-contact worked. And he said that 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. Oh, so the groups were just people being like, oh, yeah, Momo's cool. 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 and like poetry communities. You would add that interest to your V contact page.

And then if you committed suicide, it would be as if I had a my chemical romance poster on my wall and I committed suicide. And someone was like, oh, Ryan committed suicide because of he liked my chemical romance and they told him to commit suicide. Right. That's sort of what's happening here is that that. children in Russia were doing things that were self-destructive and harmful, and they had this thing tagged on their social network page.

Okay, that's ridiculous. Yeah. The article goes on to say that adults were systematically working with children, getting to know them, and slowly leading them to kill themselves. And then the reporter meets up with a mom of a teenager who committed suicide, and they go over the details over death in a way that is honestly, like very, by American standards, like, I don't think a news story would do that. 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, that's causing it. Did they ever say where they got the number? We're going to, we're going to get there. Don't worry. Okay. Thank you. So as I said,

like these are, it's not even just like one interest. This is like a network of interests that you can like tag your page with. And then the way, I guess, it works in V-contact is like, if you have the same interest as me, we can communicate wall-to-wall. Ah, okay. It's not like a private group or anything, as I had it explained to me. Within this network, there are pages. One of them is titled, Wake Me Up at 420. Nice.

The group had nearly 240,000 subscribers to it. And it was mainly used for, like, posting pictures of your dog or makeup tips. But as the No Voyagazeta article reads, and only then, an invitation. Are you a girl? Have your friends betrayed you? Did the guy leave? Did you often listen to sad music? Then subscribe to whales or swimming up? Everything is so cute and seemingly harmless. And so I guess what it's sort of describing is like you're in one group, then like people tag themselves into this network and then be like, hey, follow this group. And it's like a, it's like a cutesy whale group. And then they start like sending you like more and more fucked up like content. Oh, all right. Well, okay. Okay. That's a pretty good bit, honestly. Did you ever get like, super? Okay.

I don't know how to, there's no tasteful way to say this. Did anyone ever send you meatspin.com while you're like at work or like at school? Oh yeah. Definitely. Definitely. For listeners who don't know what that is, I'm going to, I'm going to let you describe what meat spin was. Oh, God. How do I even? I don't, I don't know. It does still exist.

I just opened it. Sorry. 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. Yeah. And it's got a counter. So, like, every time it spins, like, the counter goes up because you've gone through that many spins. I feel like there were like, like, the early internet, tons of shock sites like that. There was like, you know, lemon party and tub girl and goatsy. All those things were just like, it was a thing where, like, it was a thing where, like, Like, yes, I definitely got sent that while I was at the computer lab at school. Right. And like the thing about that period of time was that like because people were sharing different links with each other and they, you know, our real identities weren't really connected in a public way. There were a lot of shock sites.

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, like showing someone something really gross or weird. Right. Well, I still kind of do it, but I think there was a cultural shift happening where people stopped doing that as much. And I think that's kind of what's happening here is like you kind of bait kids into following this like cutesy art page. And then you start getting like weird messages. 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, you know, that the users of these communities, like, catch on that these suicides are somehow connected, and they, like, make them a big, like, meme inside the group, which is, you know, I feel like something like you still see on, like, places like 4chan with, like, Elliot Roger and stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. In this kind of situation, like, how do you know, like, what's the chicken and what's the egg?

You know, like, is this the media making the blue whale spread or is it the blue whale user? Like, which side of this do you need to catch on it or does it even matter, you know? the whole like 4chan QAnon thing like I feel like Q&OND started as like almost a joke like the first person who was doing it you know is like oh it's it'll be funny to say all this stuff because everything on 4chan was like a prank 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 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. Right. You know what I mean? So I do blame the media and the parents for just not knowing when things are a bit. Yes. It is sort of like willful context collapse. And like I get it. Like if you're if you're commit suicide like and you're then asked by a reporter why and you have the ability to say like, oh, it was this other thing that like this like alien entity that came to town and like convince them to do it.

Like I get the psychology there. What I don't get is how like Novoya Gazeta can write this article and then conclude with this line. I'm going to read it to you. We, of course, could not carefully study all 130 cases of child suicide over the past six months. 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 or to jump, you know, before they jumped off, you know, a roof or something. 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, which could be read as like an instruction or it could also just be like kind of an inspirational quote. Like all of this stuff is so nebulous. Oh, yeah.

Right. But we will come back to the 130 number. Remember that because it's very important. Now, though, we're in like full moral panic. It's beginning to spread outside of Russia. A governor of a Russian state compares the challenge to ISIS. Remember them? They were so hot back then.

They might be kind of a problem now, apparently, after what just happened in New Orleans. We're still getting information there. But back then, they were banging back then. They were out of control. They were. They were banging back then. Hey, we're going to isolate that and use that to promote this episode. Sounds great.

Alex Goldman. ISIS was banging. Okay. So it starts to spread outside of Russia. It goes across Eastern Europe. It goes to Brazil. In 2017, two U.S. deaths are associated with the game. 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. Huh. Okay. That sounds pretty solid, huh? It might be, yeah, it's irrefutable. There might be other reasons for her drawing a whale at school. I can think of a couple, but yeah, yeah, that's pretty irrefutable.

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 the Blue Well Challenge and was sending friends pictures of the completed tasks. It talks about satanic stuff and stuff like that, and my son was never into that. the dad told the Washington Post. 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. The sister added. I mean, that's really sad because those parents are trying to find a reason and something to blame for their poor kid. But, yeah. It reminds me a lot of the satanic panic in a way, but almost in the reverse, where it's like, you know,

even with all of the kind of, boundaries that have been broken down with cultures and subcultures and pop culture over the years, you know, we're still trying to reverse engineer why kids who are in a bad place mentally would gravitate towards like darker media and then trying to be like that dark media is why they're in a bad place. Like, you know, I grew up like playing punk music and listening to like really heavy extreme music and it felt really good because I felt really bad. It wasn't the other way around, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. When Columbine happened, all of the discussion was about how Doom had caused it and not about, you know, the underlying reasons.

Doom was such a, it was like such a hot topic. I couldn't believe it because it was not even a game I was really that into. And I was just like, why do they, why Doom of all things? And it's because they made a, they made a Doom Wad, like a map, a custom map of their school, which like, yeah, sure, that makes sense that they would do that. That doesn't mean that it was like a training ground. That was all the media talked about for a long time. That and Marilyn Manson. Right. I had totally forgot about the Doom connection to Columbine. And like, that's not Doom convincing them. They had to hack Doom to do that.

Right. It's the opposite. And kind of like with the Momo Challenge, now that this thing is beginning to spread, many people are kind of bringing up these things that we're bringing up, which is like, you know, does this stuff stand to scrutiny? So in 2017, Sky News publishes a, an article where they talked to a college student who supposedly did the challenge. 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. Right. So the Russian student tells Sky News and administrator gave him instructions. As I understand this, the person that leads someone through a Blue Whale challenge calls himself, quote unquote, the administrator. That's like the term inside the game. Got it. So the admin gives some instructions like, tell me how you want to die. You should watch horror films all night, which, I mean, those two things I do on dates. Like, to me, I'm just like, that's normal for me. But the college student says they start psychologically manipulating you. It's very professionally done. You become a bit of a zombie. And then he said

that as he completed the tasks, the admin would say, like, if you complete them faster, you'll become happier. 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. And that's when his parents intervened. 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. Which, you know, okay, I get it. I'm glad like they intervened. And looking back, the student said, I didn't feel like I needed to myself. I felt I needed to complete the task. I only had this thought in my head that I needed to complete the task. Hmm. You know, I deal with a lot of, you know, I take my, 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. 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. Yeah, I don't think it's, I don't think it's this thing where the media we consume, whether it's online or traditional, has no effect on us. Like, we can all agree that you can get put in a bad mood by, I don't know. I've done like reporting on terror attacks.

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. Or even if I'm like watching a terror attack from a newsroom even. I don't feel good. Like, that is real. I also think that a lot of times you seek that stuff out because you already don't feel good. Yes. That's a really good way to put it, actually.

Yeah. I think most journalists seek that stuff out because they don't feel good. By this point in 2017, Radio Free Europe is investigating the Novoie Gazeta article. 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, you start to get threatened with extortion and blackmail. Huh. Okay.

Yeah, it's actually, it's very interesting. 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, but I also feel like that's kind of an easy thing to guess in Europe. Like, I feel like most moms commute by bus. But after that initial scare, according to Raider Free Europe, things petered out. A dozen or so ex-participants told the outlet that they would like fake self-harm for the

Blue Whale moderators. So they would like find like already posted images of self-harm and like send them back. Oh. So a lot of the images of people harving themselves were just kids basically pranking the people who were putting these on. This is where it gets really interesting because it's like, everyone involved is kind of lying to everyone else. At this point, like, we're at peak hysteria.

People are trying this game because it sounds like cool and spooky. Now we're getting like genuine bad actors who are coming in to try to like extort you or blackmail you. One kid said that three of the administrators demanded to be sent 200 rubles, which is around like $3. And he just blocked them. And then that was the end of it. That doesn't seem as spooky as it could be, I guess.

It starts to feel a little less spooble. by this point. This is also where a VK starts to step in and starts banning the hashtags. That's smart of them. Took them long enough. Right. And once again, it's like MoMo where like, you know, the platform finally intervenes because everyone's losing their minds, 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 lightning rod for like bad actors who were kind of figuring out that they could use this to be bad actors online. Like Q and on, actually, like you said.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. 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. And here, read through this back and forth here. This is a short little back and forth from the fake account that Radio Free Europe was running in one of these. 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. When you finish a task, you send me a photo. and at the end of the game, you die.

Are you ready? 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. Yeah. That reminds me a lot of those spam emails

people were getting, which were like, hey, 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. That's exactly right. And I think I have to wonder how many of these users

realized that their VK or Facebook account was attached to their accounts. So, like, if they wanted to guess things about your life, they could just use that. Right. Right? In this instance, the Radio Free Europe fake account was told to scratch the symbol F58 into their arm. And so they just photoshopped it, and then they got blocked. Which I think is kind of funny.

That is pretty funny. You were curious about the 130 number. which I think is the big thing. How did this happen? The BBC eventually went back and tried to like re-report all the Novoya Gazeta stuff. They spoke to a Russian journalist who said the idea of 130 deaths kind of all stemmed from one grieving father. Interesting. Yeah.

So his name is Sergei Pestoff. His daughter committed suicide in 2015. And as the BBC writes, he and his wife founded an organization called Saving children from cybercrime. They produced a brochure. It implied that foreign intelligence might be to blame for their daughter's death and that operatives were destroying the Russian people by inciting their children to suicide. 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. And that number was 130. 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. or they just find somewhere. Right. 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. And it was like, yeah, this all looks right to me. Read my brochure. This is all blue whale. I don't want to dunk on this guy because like, like I said, I understand that the tough thing about these stories, you know,

is that everyone is operating from a like a very emotional place. Right. I know, I can't imagine being super rational if one of my kids. kids died from suicide. 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. It gives people a sense of agency when they feel helpless. Right. Exactly. The BBC's conclusion on all this comes from an interview they did with Exandra Arkipova, a professor in folklore studies at the Russian State University for Humanities. 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, which is that the curators, as these people are called, like the administrators of the game, they were around 12 to 14 years old. Oh, my God. How did they even find that out just by looking at their VK profiles? Seems like it.

The BBC writes, far from being manipulative adults, all the curators seem to be kids who had read or heard about the game. In fact, Arcova's research suggests the challenge might not have ever really existed in a substantial way before the Navoya Gazeta article was published. That's crazy. And that's the thing. That's the same thing with that devious licks challenge. It's like the warnings about the problem create the problem. Right. It's totally circular logic. Everyone involved is like trying to make sense of this thing that is like not something you can really make sense of.

Like in this case, like suicide is one of those things where I think that. There's just a desperate need for answers that do not exist in most cases, right? So, yeah, at this point, it feels not real. But this did lead to arrests. And after the break, we're going to be talking about people who actually did go to prison because of the Blue Whale Challenge. Okay, so the big question is, if this was just a big moral panic, a classic viral frenzy, why were people arrested? So, Ilya Ziderov was a 26-year-old mailman and was found, of operating a group of death. His conversations were with a 14-year-old who was discovered after

the girl had ingested poison, and she had been receiving death threats after refusing to kill herself. But she lived. 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. And he was not the only one. There was a whole bunch of these. 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. And this is all blue, these are all Blue Whale Challenge people? Well, it's death groups, according to police statements in Russia. That's the thing. It's awfully vague. Yeah. I mean, one could argue this is a grooming story or this is a cyberbullying story.

Right. Remember the teenage girl who kind of became the symbol of the Blue Whale Challenge? Yes. Yes. So one of these guys. took credit for that. And he did an interview. His name was Philip Boudicin. And he was asked why. And he said that she was a secretarian. Have you ever heard this term before? No. So this is fascinating. This is in Russia, a secretarian is a member of a group or people that general society doesn't look upon favorably, like a cult member or someone who's kind of like subcultural, countercultural. Huh.

Weird. I've never heard that word before in my life. Yeah. He did say a bit more, and it kind of reads like the Joker. He wrote, there are people, and there is bio waste. And these are those who do not represent any value to society and bring or will cause harm to society. I cleanse our society of such people.

Oh, okay. I see. So he's like a vigilante, but like a vigilante that doesn't really have a point of view. He just is vigilant and wanting to harm others. Well, hold on. You might notice a theme here really soon. So he went on to say on February 17th, 2016, I met a girl. She suffered.

We started talking and went on Skype. 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. I decided that, well, I need to get rid of something. such people. I don't like people who bring pain to other people or harm to society. She was a Satanist. So this is made up. This person's making this up. Well, I think that's one interpretation. I also think there's like a version of this. Okay. 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, like the blue whale symbol goes viral. We know that like there were these green.

on VK. Right. They become a hot, like a hot area for a teens to communicate. And you get the normal creeps and in cells and cyber bullies and extortionists that go to every single, like, these people are on Habo Hotel. They were on like Club Penguin. Like they're hosting Twitch streams with a fake mustache and sunglasses, if you know what I mean. I do.

I don't know what you mean. Throughout history, even before the, internet. If you put enough children, it won't place and supervised, like a bunch of bad actors and creeps are going to show up. And I think that there is a version of the story where we are like kind of just talking about like proto-Russian insuls. Ah, that makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense. To me, it's, to me, that all sounds very fantastical. Like, oh, I had to take like the, the Joker language, but then I guess, I don't know. I guess that that is also the way Insels talk. So that makes it very reasonable that that's possible

that that's what's going on. Yeah, because you have to remember, like, insoles are the Joker of our world, you know? For them, the Joker's not funny. He's just normal. He's not scary. Yeah, right. The Joker's just what they're like.

Yeah, that's right. As for the 130 number that was reported in the initial article, like the thing that everyone kind of hangs on to, Philip Budikin took credit for the 130 number. He did say that the piece was pathetic and kind of poorly raised. But this is what he said. He said, perhaps the death of the 130th teenager is attributed to me because the idea suddenly became some kind of trend. A lot of imitators have appeared, which by the way, really infuriates me. Because of all of this, such a wild noise arose that we had to stop for a while.

Hmm. Okay. Which is not true. Because, in fact, actually more people got in on the game after the article. And in fact, possibly him as well. Yeah. Again, it just feels like everybody taking credit for for QAnon. You know what I mean? Like all the people who are like, no, I'm QAnon. Right. Or I'm Satoshi Nakamoto. All those people are just like, I don't know.

It kind of has the same vibe to me. Satoshi Nakamoto is a really good example of this, where it's like this thing that happened right before the mainstreaming of the internet. Right. QAnon could not have happened anywhere else other than 4chan because 4chan hasn't been paved. It's still the wild way. It's still this like context free zone. And I feel like with like social media, especially.

in Russia, which was like not, you know, it's not as big. It's just V-contact is primarily for Eastern Europe. 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. Right. That makes perfect sense. So this is kind of where we thought the story would end. It seems really fake, but some creeps took credit. Some went to jail. And that was as much as we could find. But literally the morning we started recording this, our Producer Grant spoke to Sergei Kosovo Kassio, the reporter from Radio Free Europe, who not only went undercover to play the game, but has been in touch with Philippe,

one of the guys who went to jail and took credit. And so, yeah, we have not to brag or anything, but we have some original reporting. Oh, wow. So here's what Sergey told us. After that story, Sergey got in touch with Philip, the Joker, the Blue Whale Joker. Right. Philip, with the help of a lawyer, allowed Sergey to review legal documents that led his conviction. Russian authorities had tried to connect Philip with eight deaths, but only convicted

him for two. According to Sergei, there wasn't even evidence that Philip was in touch with the two he was convicted of speaking to. Whoa. So how did, well, I guess I don't know anything about the Russian, the Russian judicial system. I, from what I hear, it's quite, it's quite good. I, I hear it's fine, actually. The court relied on, okay, think of like the most bananas thing for me to say next. What do you think the court used to convict this guy? Oh, gosh. YouTube videos, Twitter threads.

The Nevoia Gazeta article. No. Oh, just bringing it all right back into a circle. This is just. this is like you know the Pepe Sylvia meme of Charlie Day you know connecting all the red thread it's like there's nothing at the center of it there's nothing there it's all gibberish right so the Navoya Gazette article comes out Philip does a bunch of interviews after taking you know credit for stuff like doing creepyposses stuff they use all that there is no evidence that he

communicated with anybody according to Sergei Philip was trolling all those quotes, all those like scary quotes, they were just, they were just made up. 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. Of all the countries on Earth, I would not do that there. Yeah, I don't think I would either. He was very, he's still upset about the Nevoie Gazette article, apparently. But Philip did kind of take accountability for certain things.

So he said that he was in a bad place. He said it felt really good to be playing this game with kids. He was 21 at the time and the kids you were speaking to were 12 or 13. And he said he thought everyone knew it was a game like creepy pasta. And then when the transcripts come out in court, they show chats where Philip and the players are communicating in a way that he thought was a joke. And in fact, Sergey told us that when he read them, it looked like a joke. 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.

Right. And this to me just reminds me of what's it called the Robin Hood Hills thing. And do you know like the Paradise Lost? Do you know that documentary Paradise Lost? Are you familiar with it? No. In the late 80s in, I don't know where Robin Hood Hills is. It's in the Midwest or South somewhere.

three children, three kids who were around 10 years old, were found murdered in the woods. And they basically went after three metalheads who were friends who lived in the area. Oh, this. I know this story. Yes. I mean, I'm pretty sure Stranger Things actually ripped that off for like the last season. I haven't watched it, but. Oh, you haven't watched Seminole Netflix TV show Stranger Things?

I have, but not the most recent season. You're not keep up. You're not going out and buying Stranger Things, Funko Pops, and Hellfire Club t-shirts? No. I will after this show if I need to do. Yeah, please do that. No, but no, I know this story. And you're totally right.

And it's exactly like that, where it's so interested to me how these moments become like magnets for everyone's particular kind of grief. And once it starts to snowball, you just like, it doesn't stop until it just comes to some kind of natural stop. Well, do you know the story of negative land, the band to Negative Land and how they got in trouble? Negative Land, they're like from San Francisco, they do sound collages, and they've been around forever. Cool. Cool. And they did an album called Christianity is stupid. Or a song called Christianity is stupid. And they just like cut up tape of a priest saying Christianity is so that it said Christianity is stupid. Communism is good. Cool. Awesome. So it's a really, really funny song.

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. And a bunch of local newspapers picked it up. This is in the mid-80s, probably. And then as a result of that, they got all of this insane bad press because this was also around the time that they were that like, you know, the PMRC was really ramping up, which was Tipper Gore's. Right. The explicit lyrics logo on packaging. And then there was like a whole media circus around it. And they created an album after that one called Helter Stupid.

That was just... These guys are marketing geniuses. This is great. That was just sound collages based on the audio of people talking about the non-existent kid who killed his family. Wow. It just feels like, yes, maybe we're smarter about the internet. But like, anytime some new media comes along, we're bound to repeat the same problem. Well, it's funny because you don't know how right you are.

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. Let's listen. I read a book about Russian Revolution once with a period between 1914 and 1917 between the first World War. the beginning of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. And there is a big, a huge case in Russian Empire

about the same sort of suicide club among teenagers based on the Artur Conan Doyle novel. You know it, a club of suiciders. So they were saying that teenagers were sending letters to each other, inciting each other to kill themselves, right? There was a secret police in Russian Empire. fifth, they call it fifth department.

And so this fifth department, the secret police, they started to investigate because it was of public interest, suicides of children. And they didn't find absolutely nothing. Oh, my God. Yeah. Like, we have been doing this for hundreds of years. 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.

You know, there will always be depressed teenagers. And even when we come to discover, they'll be depressed like young adults who are praying on those teenagers in some form. And if you leave them alone, like, it will metastasize and spread out of control. And we've been looking at a bunch of different stories like these. over the last couple weeks. And like the takeaway that I always have with this is this like, I feel like the only way you can slow these things down is on a platform level.

Like the minute VK starts blocking the hashtag, things actually do kind of calm down. Yeah, I agree. 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. I mean, I feel like, you know, Alex Jones was done once he got de-platformed everywhere. And that could have happened much earlier, but, you know, people don't want to take that step. I think everyone's mind immediately goes to like, okay, like the platforms have to intervene. They're going to tell us that Momo, the chicken with honkers, isn't evil.

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 of. it was for many years. Like, you used to have, like, different sections of the video store to buy like a horror movie versus a comedy. Right. They were magazines that clearly looked bad and were full of nonsense. And then there was the New York Times that didn't. 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. You can easily go and say, YouTube is putting a haunted chicken lady in my child's videos. And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, they would definitely do that. Yeah, for sure. And it's like, where are we talking? 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. 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, not because like there was something going on inside of her that I didn't understand. Yeah, absolutely. It's very convenient. to find an external, something external to blame that kind of tragedy on. Yeah. But you know, what was real?

Slender Man. Slender Man is real and he's my friend. Slender Man's definitely, I mean, he's very scary to me. I actually, I remember the first time I read the Slender Man 4chan post. I was like on 4chan when it was like happening. And it genuinely did make me feel kind of sick and freaked out. I really didn't like it. So I spoke to the guy who made up Slender Man in.

2013. 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 Slender Man's manager. Like, I'm responsible for his,

his reputation. Is he the same guy who made Marble Hornets? No, it's a different guy. And for listeners, you don't know Marble Hornets, you should, by the way,

because we talked about it in our Blurner Witch episode with the illustrious David Sims. But right after the guy that Alex spoke to invented Slender Man, 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 and it was basically showing Slender Man slowly haunting and making this guy go crazy and I watched it one afternoon and felt like really upset. It was really creepy actually.

It was so good for people who had like no money and were just kind of doing it on their own. It was awful. Yeah, it was amazing. This guy just like made a couple of Photoshop. shops and then they really took off. They were on something awful, actually. Yeah. Wasn't the,

story like, this is the last photo of a child who went missing and then you noticed Sunder Man in the background? I think that was the lore, right? Yeah. So he made this thing and he was like, I feel really responsible for like the reputation of this character. Like, I want him to, like, people to like him and, like, feel good about him. And then maybe 18 months after he did that, there was that, like, sort of notorious stabbing where those two girls stab their friend because they believe Slender Man was going to, you know, take them to their, some magical realm or something to that effect. 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? But I think he just kind of cashed out. I think he got some money

for the Slender Man movie and that was that. Whenever anything like that happens, I, you know, I always assumed that like there was a breakdown somewhere. It wasn't like the media, the piece of media or content made people go out of control. It was like, there's so many off-ramps before something horrible happens. And I feel the same way about the Blue Whale Challenge of Momo and stuff. And all of these kind of like creepy pasta games that spin out of control where it's like, humans are much more complicated and in control, I think, of their own behavior than we want to think sometimes. And so it's like when something, you know, 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, you know, it made them crazy, you know. Alex, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Everyone, go listen to Alex's new show hyperfixed. It's fantastic. It's lovely. And hopefully this wasn't a massive, massive downer. My pleasure is a lot of fun.

I mean, not fun, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot. Good. I'm glad. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? 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.

Not hard to find. If you Google Alex Goldman, you'll find me. You heard it here, folks. He's around. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. This was awesome.

If you, for some reason, want more of this deep, dark world, and you don't feel satisfied by my own hosting, I guess, you can go listen to Grant's interview with Sergei. We put the whole thing on our Patreon, which once again is 90% off until February 8th. Just use the word panic at checkout in all caps. And here is a little taste of Grant's

interview with Sergey to see if you feel like it's worth 50 cents. We feel very confident that once you listen to some hardworking reporting, reporting, some real journalistic integrity, totally handled only by me, you'll realize where the money should go to. All right, here's a preview. So with the first one, there was proof that she was in contact with Philippe,

but with the second one there was. There was still no proofs, because first of all, there were several accounts with the same nickname, Philippe's, right? Philip the Fox, he was calling himself. And she was speaking to several nicknamed the person behind those nicknames. Nobody knows who these people are. Or if this was Philippe, or if there was some other people.

I mean, we don't know. Nobody knows. And the case material, we wouldn't find this information either. So what they said, they said that they think, the investigative committee thinks that Philip Budakin was sending similar analogous messages to this particular person as he was sending to other people. And this is why she decided to kill herself. You see what I mean? And the actually the dialogues with the other kids are really a funny joke.

So when you read them, you see obviously that these are jokes. Like they say, ah, you have to, I order you. Sorry, I order you to kill yourself. You have to jump out of the ninth floor, he says. And the kids in the chat, it's like a chat. So you have many people inside, right? Some teenager replies, ah, I live in a. in a small town, we don't have nine stories buildings here.

We only have five. And he says, well, we'll jump from the fifth one. Otherwise, I will miss, or whatever, do some bad words on you. How do you call that? Like a witcher's. A curse. Yeah, I'll curse you. So they actually were joking with each other.

Like everybody would see that there's a joke. But the investigative committee decided to treat it as a real dialogue pushing towards the suicide. and the judge reads it the way investigative committee reads it and so this is why they put the person in prison so I'm not saying that what he was doing was a nice thing to do

to children especially that kids were like 12, 13, 14 years old and the guy was 21 at the time so he was adult but then I mean there's no proof that he actually was behind any real suicide 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,

Hedip Wiedakin, he was trying to calm them down into, like, when he was understanding, it's not a joke anymore, and the kid is really in trouble. He was trying to sort of, you know, speak normally with this person saying that, okay, life is not that terrible as it seems only you're 13 years old. Panic World is a garbage day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself with research

from the always fantastic Adam Bumas. A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show. And a huge thank you to Kat Rijesk, our lovely video editor. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners,

multitude. productions slash ads. We have a Patreon which you can find at patreon.com slash Panic World. and I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.