Momo Challenge hoax

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2018 · WhatsApp and YouTube, using a photo of a sculpture first shown at a gallery in Tokyo · Also known as Momo Challenge hoax; Momo; #MomoChallenge; Mother Bird

What it is

A scare story, mostly passed between parents, that a character called Momo was contacting children on WhatsApp (a phone messaging app) and inside YouTube videos, setting them dangerous tasks that ended in self-harm or suicide. Momo's face was a photo of a sculpture: a woman with bulging eyes, stringy black hair, a wide grin and bird legs. No one ever showed the challenge itself existed. The warning about it existed, and huge numbers of people shared it.

Where it came from

The face came from Mother Bird, a sculpture by the Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso of the effects company Link Factory, shown at a Tokyo gallery in 2016. Its photo already circulated on horror forums. In July 2018 YouTube commentators began describing a 'Momo Challenge' modelled on the Blue Whale Challenge, an earlier Russian rumour about a suicide game. News reports linked it to deaths in South America and India that police couldn't confirm. It faded by September 2018, then came back much bigger in February 2019, when a Northern Ireland police Facebook post and an Instagram Story from Kim Kardashian spread the claim that Momo was spliced into children's videos.

How people used it

Mostly, people forwarded warnings. Parents shared screenshots and posts on Facebook saying Momo appeared halfway through Peppa Pig cartoons or Fortnite videos, and schools and police sent letters home. The expected reply was to share it again and promise to check your child's tablet. Some people sent Momo messages to friends as a prank, which Indian investigators said explained many of the reported cases there. Players added Momo skins and mods to Minecraft. Others pasted the face into harmless pictures to mock the panic, and by March 2019 the coverage of the scare had become the main story.

Why it mattered

It's one of the clearest cases of a moral panic running on the same social media it warned about. The warnings travelled much faster than anyone checked them. By March 2019 the Children's Commissioner for England, the NSPCC, the Samaritans and the UK Safer Internet Centre were asking people to stop spreading it, partly because the warnings were showing children the frightening face. YouTube said it had found no videos promoting the challenge. Later scares about online 'challenges' were often measured against it.

The jokes around it

• Blue Whale Challenge: the earlier Russian rumour Momo was modelled on, also never shown to be a real game.
• Mother Bird: the sculpture's real name, which Keisuke Aiso later said he'd thrown away because it had rotted.
• Momo photoshopped into family photos, cartoons and other harmless pictures to mock the panic.
• Momo Minecraft skins and mods, which Microsoft said it would restrict after news reports.
• Peppa Pig and Fortnite: the two names that came up most in the 2019 warnings.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People shared a warning about a danger they'd never seen because sharing felt like protecting someone. The sharing put the frightening face in front of far more children than any message from Momo did.

What noah is not sure of

The claim that Momo was spliced into YouTube or YouTube Kids videos was never confirmed, and YouTube said it found no evidence. The 2016 exhibition date and the sculpture's destruction (reportedly 2018) rest on press interviews with Aiso. The specimen text's claim that the hoax lasted until April 2020, and its link between Momo and a murder in the Philippines, are unverified and left out.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.