This week has brought us a resurgence of another case in point. It’s something that’s surfaced a few times over the years but has quickly flowed its way across mainstream news reporting and all through my social media feeds (as well as talk in the office) once again this week. It’s dubbed the “Momo challenge” and, for those of you unaware of it, it purports to (amongst the many variations and permutations of the story) be encouraging children to self-harm and harm others by the insertion of a disturbing image into kid-friendly YouTube videos. It took around a day or so for the articles pointing this out to be largely a hoax to emerge* but, by the that point, the original scaremongering stories had been widely shared, even to the point that schools were providing advice leaflets based upon the erroneous facts.**
So what do we do nowadays to combat these instances? Here’s my two penneth which, as always, you can feel free to disregard.
As A Journalist/Writer
Use some basic fact checking sites before you publish something. I realise we live in a time when print revenue has mostly dried up and generating clickbait titles in order to get ad-valuable eyeballs is both easy and tempting but I would like to believe there are still enough people out there interested in disseminating something that’s as close to factual as is possible.
One of the best known and still most reliable sites for this is Snopes. It started out a long time ago in the early days of the online world as a page for checking urban legends but has broadened into a much more wide-ranging fact-checking website. Having been around for about 25 years, it’s one of the more respected sources for verifying online stories. There are also FullFact.org (UK-focussed) and FactCheck.org (US-focussed), both of which are independent sites.
As A Reader
Use those fact checking services yourself, particularly when it comes to any story that involves things that are supposedly happening as a result of something being prompted on the internet. Yes, we do live in a point in history when many people are happy to do many stupid and/or dangerous things in order to get some attention on social media but don’t assume that, because of that, anything that claims “The Internet Says” is true.
Is this infallible? Of course not and the overhead of going and fact-checking absolutely everything you read is somewhat prohibitive. However, if you are thinking about sharing something via social media that might well “transmit collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population in society as a result of rumors and fear” (the Wikipedia definition of mass hysteria there) then it’s worth, in my opinion, taking those extra few seconds to see if you can verify it first.
There you go, that’s my soapbox moment over with, back to pop culture nonsense next time.
* Detailed Snopes article here - How Much of a Threat Is the Purported ‘Momo Challenge’ Suicide Game?; BBC version here - Momo Challenge: The anatomy of a hoax; and Independent article here - The Momo challenge is nothing to be scared of – so why are these cyber hoaxes so popular? As a personal rule of thumb, I find if a link has the words “Daily” and “Mail” in it, you can probably discount it as bullshit. Just my personal view, of course.
** Parents were reporting it to schools based upon articles they'd read leading to schools responding to parents with their own fact sheets based upon articles reported to them by parents thus generating more articles about schools warning parents about it. The beginning of the snake-eating-its-own-tail of any good rumor/hoax. Fascinating as a psychological study of how fear is generated and spread but not overly helpful in terms of actual facts.
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