Momo — Internet Hoax or Modern Myth?

What the moral panic around Momo reveals about our fears of the internet

You’ve most likely heard of Momo by now. First cropping up in mid-2018, this large-eyed monster has had a spectacular rise to infamy in the last couple of weeks, reported to be part of a “viral” internet game that targeted children with threatening messages. Depending on where you read about it, Momo “hacked into” apps such as YouTube or WhatsApp, “harvested personal data,” “and / or issued commands to young children, from cutting their hair to self-harm and suicide.

In the lightning speed of today’s news cycle, the dangers of Momo have already been thoroughly debunked. Much of the coverage now refers to the phenomenon as an “internet hoax,” yet another example of how Fake News has pervaded our society and dulled our capacity for skepticism, turning us into a gullible mob ready to jump on the next moral panic at a moment’s notice.

However, to refer to Momo as a “hoax” is not quite accurate, implying as it does a single, easily dismissable malicious source. If we look more closely at the spread of this panic, it becomes clear that Momo has been more akin to an urban legend — a monstrous myth for the online age. Our susceptibility to the tale tells us far more about our own fears for the uncertain digital future than it does about the monster, or even the children it purportedly victimises. In this post I will outline how Momo fits into the modern history of urban legends, and account for the subconscious worries that have primed us for its ascent from the deep web to the front pages of the internet.

Urban legends are tales that belong in folk tradition, passed around from person to person in much the same way as myths and fairytales have been for millennia. What separates them is that the stories of urban legends are told as if true — believed by both the teller and the listeners, they tend to take place in contemporary settings, with specific details and references to sources that make them seem credible and immediate. They are the anecdotes you vaguely recall having read in the newspaper, or hearing from “a friend of a friend” (dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean léi, so the Irish saying goes).

Jan Harold Brunvand, one of the most well-known folklore researchers of the 20th Century, has tracked the spread of hundreds of urban legends, finding that again and again, the same basic stories circulate in different communities, embellished to include new information and local details to make them fresh and believable. Several of the tales he collected have now entered mainstream consciousness as fictions — the alligators in NYC sewers, the hitchhiker who mysteriously vanishes from the back seat, the babysitter who calls the police about the weird phone calls she’s been getting, only to learn they are coming from the upstairs room — but many are still in circulation, believed and elaborated in a continuous cycle. They are the campfire stories of today –indeed, Brunvand described how the phrase “I read this somewhere in a newspaper” has become as standard a story opening as “Once upon a time” was in the past.

It has always been difficult to trace the origin of folk tales, and urban legends whether spread by word of mouth or written communication have been no different. Part of the difficulty is that the people spreading the story are often themselves just as convinced of its truth. As Brunvand explains:

“Tellers of these legends, of course, are seldom aware of their roles as “performers of folklore. The conscious purpose of this kind of storytelling is to convey a true event, and only incidentally to entertain an audience.”

You can try to track word of mouth back from person to person, but while each previous iteration of the story will make it increasingly clear that the tale is not actually true, a single original source remains elusive. Even when you hit upon a news article describing a similar story, you cannot assume that this is the authentic account. Urban legends have a weird symbiosis with mass media, whereby news organisations are always on the lookout for fantastical local tales they can cover— coverage which in turn lends further credence to the tale itself, spreading it even more widely.

As our ways of communicating have changed, so too has the spread of urban legends, moving beyond the traditional word-of-mouth to more modern methods. In the 1980s, Brunvand noted a new category of “xerox-lore” cropping up in offices — stories that circulated through photocopies of typed or handwritten pages. Brunvand, who retired in 1996, only researched the beginnings of the impact internet communication would have on the spread of urban myths. He included a couple of instances in one of his books — chain e-mails that warned people of HIV-contaminated needles left in public spaces. “Not a Joke!!! IMPORTANT ISSUE” one of them began, claiming that the information came from “A very good friend of mine … in an EMT certification course.” The stories were quickly debunked online by the CDC. “Maybe,” Brunvand prophesised in 1998, “this is the true future of urban legends: rapid Internet circulation of doubtful stories, followed by rapid Internet denials.”

It would be hard to hit upon a more accurate prediction of what was about to take place. As the internet exploded in the new millennium, the new ways of communicating led to a blossoming of new folklore for the modern age. Now it is easier than ever for a story to multiply and spread itself all over the world in a very short space of time, and at times more difficult than ever to decipher what is actually the truth.

Building from the duplicated “xerox-lore” of previous decades, “copy-pastas” or short copy-and-pasted pieces of text formed some of the first examples of digitally-grown folklore, circulating rapidly through communities on the internet. A common example was the digital rejuvenation of the chain message, in warnings that urged people to share the text they were reading to prevent some unfortunate occurrence from taking place. You’ll probably have come across the “Facebook Gold” post on your feed at some point, or seen one of its predecessors, the “Hotmail is shutting down” chain emails (both above). Interesting to note is the reflective nature of these rumours, playing on anxieties about the very social technologies used to spread them — I’ll talk further about this later.

Some copypastas, such as those found in the “creepypasta” communities, have by now developed into genres that are more self-aware of their artifice, where authors make conscious use of the trademarks of folklore to give their spooky fiction a believable ring. However, others (and this is where the Momo panic falls) continue to be authentically shared by unaware parties, growing organically in detail as it spreads. I should stress again that, as with oral urban legends, the posters themselves may well be fully convinced of the story, and see themselves as spreading vital public information. If you take a look at the Momo facebook posts above, you will see several variations, as well as a number of characteristics of urban legend coming into play. The posters, just like oral “performers” of urban legends in decades past, put their own spin on the tale; though very few (if any) will provide any concrete evidence. Posters will exhort others to share, and insist on the veracity of what they are saying, (e.g. “THIS IS NOT A JOKE!!!”) thus ensuring the tale continues to be believed and spread. As with earlier urban legends, the popular posts are publicised by mass media and celebrities, increasing the myth’s credibility and fuelling more discussion, in a feedback loop that balloons the story far beyond the initial warnings.

Brunvand, and other folklore researchers, have demonstrated how urban legends give voice to the cultural anxieties of their time, surviving because they deliver an underlying moral that reflects what the society values or fears. I’ve explained the similarities between the growth of the Momo myth and the spread of urban legends in decades past. I’d now like to get a little more theoretical, and think about why this myth in particular has proved so effective at stoking our moral panic and causing such immense distress in the last few weeks. Some legends may require a lot of parsing to reach this buried message, but it’s safe to say that with Momo, a monstrous social media game that targets young children, you don’t have to dig very deep.

Our longtime discomfort with technological advancement has resulted in a rich, repetitive history of haunted folklore. For example the advent of the telegraph, as cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce has outlined, was accompanied by widespread worry about the ways it would change how we communicate, creating for the first time the ability to contact people across the globe with an incredible immediacy, while remaining physically apart from them. Sound familiar? With the creation of each new social medium, the same myths and the same anxieties emerge in new forms over and over again. “Immediacy coupled with isolation” has continued to occupy a key place in our fears, as the wireless, television and the internet each in their turn “became this ominous thing that would bring the distant near, and project that which was supposedly near out into the distance, opening up these voids where monsters were apparently roaming.”

There is also, despite the promise of each new technology providing evermore easily accessible information, a persistent fear of the unknown. As Line Henricksen, a researcher into hauntology and digital media puts it, we have grown totally dependent on digital technologies and systems while knowing almost nothing about their workings. Far from making things clearer, online communication platforms are controlled by systems which are “intentionally constructed to be non-transparent — to be unseen.” The digital world of bots and algorithms is modelled on nonhuman biologies (e.g. “virality”), and is so estranged from our understanding that it is “actually quite ‘monstrous’” to behold.

The above anxieties have given rise to countless fear-filled stories about the dangers we have unleashed. Jeffrey Sconce writes that “Tales of paranormal media are important… as a permeable language in which to express a culture’s changing social relationship to a historical sequence of technologies.” The folkloric creepypasta stories I mentioned earlier often use the horrors of unfathomable digital mechanisms as a focus for their scary tales — the community “leapt onto that social imaginary of the “Deep Web” as a horrible place… strange voids that are characterized by coldness, by inhospitality to human beings, full of monsters.” Similarly, chain warnings like “Facebook Gold” concern themselves with the fear that the impenetrable systems on which we all rely on are in fact transient and fallible, and we have no control over when their end will come. However, our fears really go into overdrive when we consider the impact digital media is having on the younger generations.

We have always been unsettled by how easily younger generations laugh off the superstitions of those who came before them. “Children know such a lot nowadays” JM Barrie laments in Peter Pan, a play in which the skepticism of the young is literally fatal to the mythic world. Just as my generation would find anxieties about the telegraph or the radio laughable, it’s not exactly a secret that the teenagers currently coming of age, the first cohort to have known the internet for their entire lifespan, are substantially more digitally literate. This rising generation is treated with fascination by mainstream media, with day-in-the-life observational articles and films abounding on the cloud-connected lives of thirteen-year-olds. They build media empires in their bedrooms before they are old enough to vote. They shape-shift their photos, manipulating their features beyond all recognition, to be “social media ready.” Even chain messages, and their earnest warnings of previous decades, through the keyboards of iGen have morphed into ironic and lewd parodies.

This disturbing savviness of youngsters is coupled in our minds with the very real and frightening ways that the algorithmic systems we have grown dependent upon are putting children at risk. James Bridle’s 2017 article highlighted how the vast quantities of children’s animations being churned out on YouTube (and marked as safe for children in the YouTube Kids filter) have been taking a decidedly disturbing turn, sometimes maliciously, and sometimes because the bots that create them on a logarithmic scale through keyword/hashtag association have spawned horrifyingly misjudged content, due to the sheer volume they are programmed to produce. Earlier this year, YouTuber MattIsWhatItIs drew fresh attention to an already reported issue, whereby YouTube’s algorithms facilitate paedophilic searches, pulling viewers into an exploitative “wormhole” of pre-pubescent content, much of which is monetized by the site. So removed are we from the linked-up world where children congregate, that we are powerless even to see what is happening to them — much less to help them put an end to it.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that our collective cultural discomfort has manifested itself in this new mythic monster — one which targets children, finding its way into the very technologies that separate them from our understanding, and forcing them to conform to fears and superstitions we can recognize. Our rapidly spreading fears about Momo have become a subconscious manipulation, keeping our children innocent and fearful, and “safe” from the perils of the digital era. But at what price? The harm we are causing children by warning them unnecessarily of Momo has already been cautioned by charities, including NSPCC and Samaritans. It feels doubly traitorous that while our fears revolve around the perils of technology rather than any real supernatural concern, to the young children unfortunate enough to be exposed to the warnings, Momo “the monster” is what will haunt them. Talking about belief in fairies and Peter Pan, Marina Warner writes:

“This emotional blackmail — with its shameless pulling of the heartstrings — remains fractured by the irony that however loudly we (adults) clap to show our faith, Barrie isn’t sincere and neither are we, and if the children with us are convinced, they’re dupes of a need that adults feel, which children meet.”

Through Momo, we are transplanting our fears — of technology, of the knowledge-gulf between us and the next generation, of growing up and either losing our youthful superstitions or finding them ridiculed by the young — onto the children we hope to protect. We can at least take comfort that, in the long line of urban legend and technological advancement, this “hoax” is nothing new. “All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.”