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'Momo' may be 'dead,' but experts say avoiding the next hoax is up to us
[...] So how did we get here? How did this apparent hoax, now just the latest fodder for internet memes, wind up causing panic among parents in countries from India to Colombia, from the UK to the United States, and from the Houses of Parliament to U.S. police agencies?
[...] Laura Hazard Owen, deputy editor of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, called the "Momo challenge" phenomenon "the most fascinating/unique fake news story I've covered in awhile." The problem, she said, was that most of the news stories warning people about "Momo" appeared to be based on hearsay. One local news station, she pointed out, "simply interviewed a 5-year-old," while others ran with anecdotes from parents who had heard from their child that they had heard from another child... you get the point.
[...] "Unless you can watch all media, TV and news, consciously, step back from it, get a little distance and ask yourself what's being said, you're going to be taken in," Dr. Mramor argued. "It's like when you're watching a scary movie and get sucked into the plot... be a conscious consumer," she said. "And if more people were, this would never have happened. We wouldn't even be talking about this story."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Wednesday March 13 2019, @02:34PM
Sigh - it seems like only yesterday we were all desperately explaining to worried muggles why you couldn't possibly get a computer virus by opening an email with the subject "Good Times"... because back then you couldn't get a computer virus from an email unless you spent 10 minutes mucking about with UUdecocde and manually unpacking ZIP files... Then, Outlook, buffer overruns, disguised web links etc. happened...
So, the problem is partly overblown hysteria - its a sort of denial-of-service packet-flood attack on common sense. People are so busy having to debunk the fake 'immediate danger' threats that the messages about sensible caution get drowned out. See also "the boy who cried wolf".
Of course, this is all a subset of "Why go to all the expense and effort of responsible journalism when you can just run another 'B-list celebrity posts troll-bait on Tw@tter - gets trolled - dozens of people tweet their outrage' story " - I sometimes suspect that the real menace of social media is the way traditional media (terrified of being replaced) are giving it status and respectability.