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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: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:23PM
It was a moral panic caused by a well-positioned and executed anti-pattern meme. This was partly merely luck mind you. It managed to catch on and spread rapidly on the heels of other recent news reports.
Things like this are constantly being created and spread to the wind, but this one happened to hit when the public was primed for such a thing to catch fire and spread, so to speak. Recent actual incidents made this meme warning seem believable. It was the difference between throwing a lit cigarette in the ocean during a storm or throwing it into dry brush during a drought.