U.S. News

The “Momo Challenge” is a name given to a supposed “challenged trend” that gained popularity early in 2019 and has been linked to reports of online antagonism and suicide among participants.

The character of “Momo” is actually a sculpture called Mother Bird, which is a representation of a Japanese folk figure called the ubume, or “bird woman”. This sculpture and its creator have nothing to do with the hoax.

The challenge first gained popularity in July 2018 in Mexico.

“Momo” appeared as a profile picture of multiple WhatsApp accounts (a popular messaging app), which have been active since 2016. If contacted, this account would reportedly reply with gruesome images and threatening messages. The “challenge” came from attempting to contact the disturbing account.

The Buenos Aires Times wrote that a 12 year old girl committed suicide because of the alleged “challenge” connected to the account, although this story had no confirmed connection to the character.

In August 2018, the deaths of two young men in India were reportedly tied to the game.

Not long after, the suicides of two teenagers in Columbia were linked to participation in the challenge.

Back then, it was fairly unknown, mainly being popular in Latin America. In 2019, popularity spread to the UK after a mother expressed her concern about the character on social media.

She said she was “deeply alarmed” after being told by a teacher that her son made children cry by telling them “Momo was going to go into their room at night and kill them.”

She did acknowledge that her son was never actually contacted by “Momo,” but had been told by another child at school “to look at the Momo Challenge.”

The more recent rumors of the challenge started when a Twitter user tweeted out a warning to parents along with an image of the sculpture. The rumours escalated when Kim Kardashian posted a warning as well.

Along with the WhatsApp incidents, images of the sculpture have been appearing in children’s YouTube videos and telling them to kill themselves, namely clips of the television show Peppa Pig.

It is obvious how this could scare children, but there have been no reports of any suicides linked to these videos, which are likely just edits made by internet trolls with malicious intent.

YouTube staff recently claimed on Twitter that they have “seen no recent evidence of videos promoting the Momo challenge on YouTube. Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges are against our policies.” YouTube has also encouraged users who have seen these videos to flag and report such content.

There is no evidence of any type of challenge associated with the sculpture, nor any confirmed suicides or murders.

The creator of the original statue, Keisuke Aiso, has destroyed the sculpture since.

Even though Aiso created Mother Bird to scare people, he says he feels responsible after it started being used to scare children.

"It doesn't exist anymore, it was never meant to last," Aiso reports to The Sun. "It was rotten and I threw it away. The children can be reassured Momo is dead – she doesn't exist and the curse is gone."

Aiso says he has “no regrets that it is gone.”

“It isn’t hard to imagine that if social media existed in the 1990s, British tabloids would run articles about ‘the terrifying challenge’ that was eight-year-olds saying ‘Bloody Mary’ three times into the bathroom mirror,” Snopes claims.

“The Momo thing is much more akin to an urban legend right now,” reports ReignBot, a YouTuber famous for exploring creepy things on the internet.

“People are claiming what Momo is and what Momo does, but not that many people have actually interacted with the account,” she said. “Finding screenshots of interactions with Momo is nearly impossible and you’d think there’d be more for such a supposedly widespread thing.”

The “Momo Challenge” is just another viral hoax that terrifies parents, despite having little evidence, not unlike the Blue Whale Challenge of 2016.