I mentioned the Momo Challenge to Galahad who scoffed at it. Rightly so.
Momo was perfectly tuned to set off alarms in the mind of any parent: There’s something online that you don’t know about, and it’s about to kill or traumatize your child. Just one problem: There’s little evidence to confirm that the Momo challenge is real. Although multiple deaths are often attributed to the challenge in warnings about it, none has been confirmed.
Several parent friends shared news stories about it. G correctly noted that it was back, which adults seemed to have missed. Attaching the concern about teens committing suicide elevated the danger that overwhelmed the downsides of failing to share it. Death is a cheap and easy button for parents.
In my day it was Satanism and heavy metal music. Parents were concerned about kids listening to the music would be seduced by Lucifer and thus kill themselves, I guess so that would go to Hell because you cannot go to Heaven if you do that. Anyway, it was easy to get parents to worry each other by sharing with others how bad it would be for the teens to participate in that stuff.
That watching Youtube is something kids are doing outside the view of parents helps with the worry. We don’t necessarily know everything that kids are watching. So, it is easy to be concerned that they are getting influenced like parents in my day were terrified of what we were listening to under our headphones.
Polymath Parent 