Momo: Anatomy of a Monster

Momo became widely known in July of 2018 but rose to particular prominence in the early months of 2019. A string-haired demon girl, Momo, is said to entrance children when she suddenly appears in the middle of child-geared media. She possesses them, speaking to them to give morbid instructions, which culminates in the child’s suicide.

The story started with the character Momo beginning to target teenagers on WhatsApp messages. The messages were typically challenges for the player to perform a series of tasks, and when there was refusal the player was met with threats. Messages were sometimes accompanied with gory or scary images. After there was some calming over the WhatsApp messages, fear in Momo rose again in early 2019, when there were claims that Momo was beginning to appear in the middle of YouTube videos.

There were no actual reports of children who had been influenced by the Momo Challenge, or even ones driven to suicide by it appearing in the middle of a video. Despite this, police, schools and media around the world continued to report on the Momo Challenge as something verified and firmly present. Often, the media reports relied on several separated accounts, mostly through parents. The Momo Challenge reveals a certain level of fear to those who were spreading the story, but it is not children who are spreading and revealing their fears – its parents.

For more technologically indifferent or illiterate parents, the internet can seem like an incredibly scary place to be. It’s something that their kids can readily pick up and understand that they don’t, a place full of different types of locations, different ways of speaking and communicating, and a way of coding language that can be hard for outsiders like parents to understand. It can very easily feel like the internet I stealing children away. When the story of Momo first appeared, it was very easy to accept on face value. The internet is already scary, so the idea of the monster prowling around it was justifiable.

What was interesting was that concerned parents actually were the ones proliferating the story by warning others about it through other media outlets. The narrative spreading led to some taking advantage of the sheer rise of searches for the monsters by creating new content so theirs becomes more visible. So in many ways, the fear around Momo actually led to more Momo, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is mostly because Momo only existed through the present fears of the internet. We can think of the internet as a place of unknown - a forest or wilderness where children enter and then become transformed by the unknown that resides there.

But what Momo shows us that the fear of the online wilderness shifts from a place that can hide monsters, to a monster itself. The internet isn’t just a place that harbours monsters, but something that is a monstrous form on its own - one that children cannot navigate without their parents.