Fear of Momo has been acute for years, but now she has a name and a face. You can learn a lot about Momo by tracing the ways her myth has been reformulated for the culture in which it’s spreading. A September post by the office of the general prosecutor of the state of Tabasco, in Mexico, warned that people were contacting children as “El Momo” on Facebook. In Argentina and India, where thinly sourced and uncorroborated reports have spread suggesting Momo led to actual suicides last year, the “game” is said to have proliferated on WhatsApp, a messaging app used widely by both children and adults in those countries, and which, in India, has been credibly implicated in mob murders inspired by viral accusations and misinformation.
The Momo that has most effectively captured the imagination of the English-speaking world is said to appear mid-video on YouTube, or even, as Ms. Kardashian West warned in her post, on its childproof subsite, YouTube Kids. These websites have been the subject of escalating and again credible reports about violent and disturbing content reaching children and predatory adults using the platform.
Since going viral, Momo has indeed become a YouTube fixture, as a subject of analysis, as a joke, and as a troll. On Friday, YouTube announced it was “demonetizing” (withholding ads from) all videos that contain Momo, suggesting that surge of attention had made posting videos about her particularly profitable.
And it’s not just YouTube. There is a Momo who is supposed to haunt Snapchat. There’s another who crashes videos of Fortnite, a uniquely popular game among young children. Momo meets kids where they are — or at least where their parents think they are.
For years,
in various online spaces, young people have been writing horror stories, often pseudonymously or in an iterative group process. Their tales are known colloquially as “Creepypasta,” an iteration of the term “copypasta,” shorthand for passages or blocks of text or chain-letter-type stories that are frequently copied and pasted in a given online community. The authors of these posts do so to scare each other, with the occasional bonus of going viral. (The Slender Man character, which inspired multiple games and a feature film, gained popularity through copypasta. Momo’s virality no doubt owes to the 2014 stabbing of a young girl by two of her friends, who later said they were influenced by the Slender Man.)
Momo is what happens when the grown-ups start writing copypasta of their own, about their own biggest fears: what their kids are doing on the internet, and what the internet is doing to their kids.
