Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her

YouTube is, in 2019, a rare space in which children can roam. It’s also completely commercialized, and, to a parent’s eye, stocked almost exclusively with choppy cuts of generically alarming images. A clip that puts children into a trance and seems to program them to do or say things? That’s not a clip in the middle of a Peppa Pig video — that’s the Peppa Pig video itself. A third party contacting a wide-eyed viewer with instructions to do something in the real world? That’s not a killer pretending to be Momo. That’s how advertising works on YouTube.

Last week, YouTube told reporters: “Contrary to press reports, we’ve not received any recent evidence of videos showing or promoting the Momo challenge on YouTube.”

But YouTube isn’t lacking as a source of psychological horror. Screens and screen time are a source of endless guilt and frustration among parents today, and it makes sense to need to displace these feelings on a face, a character, and something, or someone, with fantastically evil motives, rather than on the services that actually are surveilling what the kids are up to, to ends of their own. YouTube is where their unsupervised time might include the sudden appearance of, for example, a bunch of children chanting “baby shark” over and over again, cursing them, and eventually their parents, and the broader culture, with a nightmarish earworm which, seven days in, might at least have them wishing a shark would wriggle through the screen and eat them alive.

Momo is, as a former colleague and mother of a young child put it to me, only half-joking, “the face of a mom who hasn’t slept or showered” for lack of a moment away from a needy child. She is, like all of us, unable to know or grasp quite what a service like YouTube — or WhatsApp, or Fortnite — wants from or is doing to anyone, much less the youngest among us, but who very much isn’t ready, or able, to take it away completely.

The Momo Challenge may not be real, but Momo is more than a hoax or panic. She’s a pretty smart work of group fiction written in the grip of a pretty dumb panic, an avatar for a collective spirit that is less vengeful than guilty, anxious and helplessly angry. She, or at least her franchise, will be with us for a while.