Back in June, Benjamin Radford of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry published a report on the Blue Whale game:
Over the past few months scary warnings have been circulating on social media asking parents, teachers, and police to beware of a hidden threat to children: a sinister online “game” that can lead to death! Some on social media have limned their reporting on the topic with appropriate skepticism, but many panicky social media posts plead for parents to take action.
He identifies this as a moral panic:
Moral panics such as the Blue Whale Game are part of a very old tradition. These scary media stories are very popular because they are fueled by parents’ fears and wanting to know what their kids are up to. Are seemingly innocent role-playing games and entertainment leading to unspeakable evil, in the form of Satan or even death? We saw the same fears decades ago about Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal music, and violent video games. Now it’s online games and social media.
Indeed, the Blue Whale Game has all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic. Familiar elements and themes include:
- Modern technology and seemingly benign personal devices as posing hidden dangers to children and teens;
- In classic “Stranger Danger” fashion, the threat is some influential evil stranger who manipulates the innocent; and
- There is an element of conspiracy theory to these stories: it’s always a “hidden world” of anonymous evil people who apparently have nothing better to do than ask teens to do things for fifty days before (somehow) compelling them to commit suicide.
And, every once in a while, some horrible crime does happen that fits in one of the above categories. Consider the Slender Man stabbing:
The Slender Man stabbing occurred on Saturday, May 31, 2014, in the city of Waukesha in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, just west of Milwaukee, when two 12-year-old girls allegedly lured another girl of the same age into the woods and stabbed her 19 times, purportedly in order to impress the fictional character Slender Man. [Wikipedia]
However, Slender Man doesn’t even exist:
Slender Man is a fictional entity created for a 2009 Photoshop contest on Something Awful, an online forum, the goal of which was to create paranormal images. The Slender Man mythos was later expanded by a number of other people who created fan fiction and additional forged images depicting the entity.
Sometimes the world is more awful than you can imagine. The problem, though, is statistical – the vast majority of the time kids are not in any danger at all, but the protective urges of parents actually contributes to xenophobia – a negative phenomenon in itself.
And, if you’re a new parent, go read the article on the Blue Whale. There’s lots of good information on kids and these oddball rumors. Or see this article in Motherboard, which includes the charming word creepypasta.
