The Momo Challenge

Overview

In early 2019, parents across the English-speaking world were seized by a very specific terror: that a ghoulish, bulging-eyed woman with a grotesque bird body was lurking inside their children’s YouTube videos, commanding kids to hurt themselves through WhatsApp messages. Schools sent letters home. Police departments issued warnings. Kim Kardashian posted about it to her 129 million Instagram followers. The BBC, CBS, the Daily Mail, and dozens of other outlets ran breathless reports about the “Momo Challenge” — a sinister viral game that was supposedly driving children to self-harm and suicide.

There was just one problem. None of it was real.

The Momo Challenge is one of the most thoroughly documented cases of a modern moral panic — a fear that was manufactured almost entirely by the media coverage that claimed to be warning people about it. No law enforcement agency anywhere in the world ever confirmed a single case of a child being harmed by the “challenge.” YouTube investigated and found zero evidence that Momo videos targeting children existed on its platform. The terrifying image at the center of the panic wasn’t even a character — it was a photograph of a sculpture called “Mother Bird,” created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso for a 2016 art exhibition in Tokyo, a sculpture he eventually destroyed because the internet wouldn’t leave him alone about it.

The Momo Challenge is a story about how fear travels faster than facts, how the media can conjure threats into existence through the sheer force of repetition, and how the internet’s anxiety about itself has become one of its most reliable content generators.

Origins & History

Mother Bird: The Sculpture That Started Everything

Before it became the face of a global panic, the image was just art.

In 2016, Japanese special effects artist Keisuke Aiso (also known by his artist name “Link Factory”) created a sculpture called Ubume — the Japanese word for a ghost of a woman who died in childbirth — for an exhibition at Vanilla Gallery in the Ginza district of Tokyo. The sculpture depicted a woman-bird hybrid: a pale, humanoid face with enormous bulging eyes, stringy black hair, a distended grin, and a scrawny avian body with clawed feet. It was designed to be unsettling. That was literally the point. Vanilla Gallery specialized in erotic and horror art exhibitions. Aiso was a professional creature designer whose day job involved creating props and monsters for Japanese film and television.

The sculpture was photographed at the exhibition and, like so many striking images, eventually leaked onto the wider internet without context. Stripped of its artist’s name, its exhibition context, and its cultural roots in Japanese supernatural folklore, it became just another creepy image floating through the digital ether — nightmare fuel looking for a narrative to attach itself to.

It found one.

WhatsApp Chain Messages: The Latin American Phase

The Momo myth appears to have originated in mid-2018 in Spanish-speaking countries, particularly Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. The structure was a classic chain message — the kind that has plagued communication networks since long before the internet, from “pass this letter to seven friends or you’ll die” postal chains to the “forward this email or Bill Gates won’t give you money” hoaxes of the early 2000s.

The WhatsApp messages varied in their specifics but followed a common template: users were told that if they texted a particular phone number (often with a Japanese country code, lending a veneer of exotic menace), they would be contacted by “Momo” — the creature in the photograph — who would send them disturbing images and issue escalating “challenges.” The messages warned that failing to comply would result in Momo appearing at your door, or cursing your family, or — in the most alarming versions — Momo would “come for your children.”

This was, of course, indistinguishable from every chain letter your grandmother ever received, except that it had a genuinely creepy image attached and spread through WhatsApp rather than postal mail. The phone numbers that circulated were mostly disconnected, fake, or belonged to confused strangers who had nothing to do with anything. A few numbers did connect to people who had set up the Momo image as their WhatsApp profile picture as a prank, adding a thin layer of apparent confirmation to the hoax.

In July 2018, Argentine authorities investigated the case of a 12-year-old girl’s death and initially explored a possible connection to the Momo phenomenon based on her phone records. This investigation was widely reported in Latin American media, though no confirmed causal link was ever established. The case was enough, however, to transform Momo from a WhatsApp chain letter into something that sounded like a genuine threat.

Local media in Argentina and Mexico covered the story extensively. Police departments in Buenos Aires and Mexico City issued official warnings — not because they had evidence of actual harm, but because parents were flooding them with calls and they felt they had to say something. This is a crucial detail in the anatomy of a moral panic: when authorities respond to public fear by issuing warnings about unverified threats, they inadvertently validate and amplify the very fear they’re trying to address.

Going Global: February 2019

For months, the Momo panic remained largely confined to Latin America and parts of Southeast Asia. Then, in late February 2019, it exploded worldwide.

The trigger was a series of reports — primarily from tabloid outlets in the United Kingdom — claiming that “Momo” was being spliced into children’s YouTube videos. The claim was specific and terrifying: someone was allegedly inserting Momo’s face into Peppa Pig episodes and Fortnite clips on YouTube Kids, and the character would suddenly appear mid-video to instruct children to harm themselves, hide sharp objects around the house, or turn on the gas stove while their parents were sleeping.

These reports set off a chain reaction. Within 48 hours, the story had gone from British tabloids to virtually every major news outlet on the planet. The BBC covered it. CBS covered it. The Daily Mail ran multiple stories per day. Local television stations across the United States and UK aired segments featuring the Momo image — effectively exposing the creepy sculpture to millions of children who had never heard of it before.

Schools across the UK, US, and Australia sent warning letters home to parents. Some schools preemptively banned YouTube in classrooms. The UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) issued guidance. Police forces from Northern Ireland to New Zealand put out social media warnings.

On February 27, 2019, Kim Kardashian posted a lengthy Instagram story about Momo to her then-129 million followers, calling it “the Momo thing” and urging YouTube to address it. The post was well-intentioned — Kardashian was a parent genuinely worried about child safety — but it represented perhaps the single largest amplification event of the entire panic.

There was just one tiny detail that nobody in this chain of alarm seemed to verify: the videos didn’t exist.

The Anatomy of a Moral Panic

What Is a Moral Panic?

The term “moral panic” was coined by sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972 to describe a pattern in which a condition, episode, person, or group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. Cohen identified a predictable cycle: the threat is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by mass media; moral barricades are manned by editors, politicians, and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; and then the condition either fades away, produces changes in policy, or becomes permanently embedded in collective anxiety.

The Momo Challenge followed Cohen’s framework with almost textbook precision. Every element was present: a folk devil (the creepy Momo image), claims-makers (media outlets, police departments, schools), moral entrepreneurs (concerned parents, Kim Kardashian), and experts (child safety organizations issuing guidance about a threat they hadn’t actually verified). The only missing ingredient was the actual threat itself.

The Amplification Spiral

The Momo Challenge is a particularly clean illustration of what media scholars call a “deviancy amplification spiral” — a feedback loop in which media coverage of a supposed problem actually creates and intensifies the problem it claims to be reporting on.

Here’s how it worked:

1. Chain messages circulate on WhatsApp. A handful of people share creepy messages featuring the Momo image. This is functionally identical to every chain letter in history and is about as threatening.

2. Local media covers the chain messages as a “challenge.” By framing WhatsApp chain spam as a coordinated “challenge” targeting children, reporters elevated a nuisance into a narrative. The word “challenge” implied organization, intent, and escalation — none of which existed.

3. Parents panic and call police. Not because their children have been contacted by Momo, but because they saw the news coverage and are worried.

4. Police issue warnings. Not because they have evidence of actual harm, but because they’re being overwhelmed by calls from panicked parents and feel compelled to respond. The warnings are interpreted by media as confirmation that the threat is real.

5. More media coverage. Outlets cite police warnings and parental concern as evidence that the Momo Challenge is a genuine crisis. The coverage includes the Momo image, which is now being seen by millions of people — including children — for the first time.

6. Schools send letters home. Letters reference the media coverage and police warnings. Parents who hadn’t heard of Momo now learn about it. Some children who hadn’t heard of Momo now Google it out of curiosity. The search traffic spike is then cited as evidence that the challenge is “going viral.”

7. Celebrity amplification. Kim Kardashian’s Instagram post reaches 129 million followers, most of whom had never heard of Momo. The post generates thousands of articles about the post.

8. The thing that wasn’t real is now functionally real. Not because anyone was ever actually harmed by a Momo Challenge, but because millions of people now believe in it, fear it, and are behaving as if it exists.

At no point in this cycle did anyone produce a verified Momo Challenge video. At no point did any law enforcement agency confirm an actual victim. The entire apparatus of panic was built on a foundation of chain messages, unverified claims, and media reports citing other media reports.

Key Claims vs. Reality

Claim: Momo Videos Were Hidden in YouTube Kids Content

The claim: Someone was inserting the Momo image into videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids, particularly into popular children’s content like Peppa Pig episodes and Fortnite videos. The character would appear mid-video and instruct children to perform dangerous tasks.

The reality: YouTube investigated these claims extensively and stated publicly that they had found no evidence whatsoever of any videos promoting the Momo Challenge on their platform. In a February 2019 tweet from the official YouTube Creators account, the company said: “We want to clear something up regarding the Momo Challenge: We’ve seen no recent evidence of videos promoting the Momo Challenge on YouTube. Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges are against our policies.”

This wasn’t a hand-wave. YouTube’s content moderation team specifically searched for Momo-related content targeting children and came up empty. Other researchers who attempted to find the alleged videos also failed. The closest anyone came were videos about the Momo Challenge — news reports, commentary, reaction videos — which of course only existed because of the panic, not as evidence of it.

Some parents claimed their children had seen Momo in videos, but no one ever produced a recording, screenshot, or URL of such a video. In a world where everyone has a phone capable of recording their screen, the complete absence of captured evidence is telling.

Claim: Children Were Harmed or Killed by the Momo Challenge

The claim: The Momo Challenge had driven children to self-harm and suicide in multiple countries.

The reality: No law enforcement agency worldwide confirmed a single death or injury directly caused by the Momo Challenge. The Argentine case from 2018 was investigated but never conclusively linked to Momo. Several other cases were tentatively connected by media reports but debunked upon investigation.

UK charity the Samaritans specifically warned against linking suicide to the Momo Challenge, noting that simplistic explanations for suicide are dangerous and that the type of sensationalized coverage the Momo story was receiving could itself be harmful to vulnerable young people — a grim irony that largely went unnoted.

Claim: The Momo Challenge Was an Organized Campaign

The claim: Someone or some group was deliberately orchestrating the Momo Challenge to target and harm children.

The reality: There is no evidence of any organized campaign. The “challenge” was a confluence of WhatsApp chain spam, an uncredited creepy image, media amplification, and public fear. No perpetrator was ever identified because there was no perpetrator. The Momo Challenge was, at its core, a 21st-century chain letter that the media accidentally promoted into a global phenomenon.

Evidence & Debunking

The Fact-Checkers Weigh In

Once the initial wave of panic began to subside, fact-checking organizations dismantled the Momo Challenge claims with meticulous precision.

Snopes, the internet’s longest-running fact-checking site, rated the claim that the Momo Challenge was a real, organized phenomenon as “mostly false.” Their investigation found no verified instances of the challenge causing harm and noted that the panic was driven primarily by media coverage rather than any actual threat.

Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact-checking organization, concluded that there was “no confirmed evidence that the Momo Challenge has led to any deaths.” They found that police and school warnings were reactive rather than evidence-based, issued in response to media coverage and parental concern rather than documented incidents.

PolitiFact similarly found the claims to be exaggerated or unsubstantiated, noting the absence of verified victims or confirmed Momo Challenge videos.

The Atlantic published a widely-cited piece by Taylor Lorenz in February 2019 titled “The Momo Challenge Is Not Real” — one of the first major English-language outlets to push back against the panic while it was still at its peak. Lorenz documented the complete absence of evidence for the challenge’s existence and traced the amplification spiral that had manufactured the crisis.

YouTube’s Investigation

YouTube’s response deserves particular attention because of how thoroughly it contradicted the media narrative.

When the Momo panic peaked, YouTube didn’t just issue a denial — they actively investigated. Their Trust & Safety team searched the platform for content matching the descriptions in media reports: videos that had been altered to include the Momo image, videos instructing children to harm themselves under the Momo banner, videos targeting children through YouTube Kids.

They found nothing. Zero. Not a single video matching the descriptions that had been splashed across newspapers and television screens worldwide.

This wasn’t a case of YouTube being slow to respond or covering up a problem. It was a case of the problem not existing. The company was in the unusual position of having to publicly insist that a crisis everyone believed was happening on their platform was simply not happening on their platform — and being disbelieved by the very media outlets that had invented the crisis in the first place.

What Actually Happened to the Phone Numbers

Several phone numbers with Japanese country codes were circulated as “Momo’s number” in the original WhatsApp chain messages. Independent investigators who texted these numbers reported a range of outcomes: most were disconnected or invalid. A few connected to individuals who had set up the Momo image as their WhatsApp profile picture, likely as pranks. One number reportedly connected to a Spanish-speaking individual who sent back creepy images when contacted but didn’t issue any “challenges.” None of them matched the orchestrated, child-targeting campaign described in media coverage.

The Media’s Role

How the Press Created the Story It Was Covering

The Momo Challenge is a case study in how institutional media can manufacture a crisis through the sheer momentum of its own coverage. The mechanism isn’t conspiracy — it’s more banal than that. It’s the result of incentive structures, deadline pressure, and the competitive dynamics of modern news.

The chain went something like this: A tabloid runs a scary story. Competitors can’t afford to ignore it because if it’s real and they don’t cover it, they look negligent — especially when children’s safety is involved. So they run their own version, citing the original report. Now there are two stories, which makes it look more credible. Television picks it up. Now parents are calling schools. Now schools are sending letters home. Now police are issuing warnings. Each of these responses generates another wave of coverage. The story has achieved escape velocity from reality — it no longer matters whether the underlying claim is true because the response to the claim has become the story.

The media coverage also suffered from a fundamental sourcing problem. In the vast majority of Momo Challenge stories published in February-March 2019, the sources were: other media reports, parental concern, police warnings issued in response to parental concern, and school letters issued in response to media reports. It was a closed loop of unverified alarm, each link in the chain citing the others as evidence.

Almost none of the initial wave of coverage included statements from YouTube, which was saying the videos didn’t exist. Almost none included input from fact-checking organizations. Almost none attempted to locate the alleged Momo videos and report on whether they could actually be found. The story was too good — or rather, too scary — to verify.

The Children’s Safety Paradox

There’s a dark irony at the heart of the Momo panic: the media coverage that was supposedly meant to protect children actively harmed the effort.

By broadcasting the Momo image on television news, in newspapers, and across social media, the coverage exposed the creepy image to millions of children who had never seen it. By describing in detail the supposed “challenges” (self-harm, turning on gas stoves, hiding knives), the coverage provided a template that didn’t previously exist. By framing the narrative as a “challenge” spreading among children, the coverage made it sound like something kids were actually doing — potentially encouraging imitation in vulnerable individuals.

The Samaritans, the Papyrus suicide prevention charity, and multiple child psychologists made exactly this point at the time: the coverage itself posed more of a risk to children than the non-existent Momo Challenge ever did. This feedback was largely ignored by the outlets still generating Momo content.

Kim Kardashian and Celebrity Amplification

Kim Kardashian’s involvement is worth examining not as a criticism of Kardashian — she was doing what any concerned parent with a platform might do — but as an illustration of how celebrity amplification works in the age of social media.

Kardashian posted about Momo on February 27, 2019, at or near the peak of the panic. Her post reached an audience larger than the viewership of most television news broadcasts. It was sincere, emotional, and concerned. It was also based entirely on the unverified media reports she had seen, not on any independent investigation of whether the Momo Challenge was real.

The post generated its own wave of media coverage — “Kim Kardashian Warns About Momo Challenge” became a story in itself — further amplifying the panic. The post’s reach meant that demographics who might not have encountered the Momo story through traditional news channels were now exposed to it. The cycle of amplification extended into new audiences.

Cultural Impact

The Meme-ification of Momo

In one of the internet’s more predictable plot twists, Momo became a meme. Once the panic subsided and the debunking became widely known, the same image that had terrified parents became the subject of jokes, parodies, and ironic internet humor. Momo appeared in meme formats, was photoshopped into unlikely situations, and became a shorthand for media-driven moral panic.

This is the lifecycle of internet fear: terror, debunking, meme. The Momo image went from nightmare to punchline in about three months.

The Destruction of Mother Bird

The person perhaps most affected by the Momo panic was the one who had the least to do with it: Keisuke Aiso.

Aiso, the sculptor who created Ubume/Mother Bird for a 2016 art exhibition, found himself suddenly and bizarrely at the center of a global controversy. He received hate mail, threats, and media inquiries from around the world. People blamed him personally for the “Momo Challenge,” as if creating a sculpture for a Tokyo horror art show was somehow equivalent to organizing a campaign to harm children.

In 2019, Aiso revealed that he had destroyed the sculpture. The rubber and natural oils in the piece had deteriorated — it was already falling apart physically — but the decision to discard rather than preserve it was clearly influenced by the unwanted association. “It doesn’t exist anymore, so please rest assured,” he told reporters, apparently referring to parents who feared the image. A piece of art — one that had been created for a legitimate exhibition, displayed in a gallery, and appreciated by the small community of horror art enthusiasts who knew about it — was destroyed because the internet stripped it of context and built a monster myth around it.

It remains one of the more quietly tragic outcomes of the whole affair.

Template for Future Panics

The Momo Challenge established a template that subsequent internet moral panics would follow. The “48-hour challenge” (another fabricated viral challenge), various TikTok challenge scares, and periodic “something dangerous is hiding in kids’ YouTube videos” stories all follow the same basic pattern: an unverified claim circulates online, media amplifies it without verification, authorities respond to the amplification rather than to evidence, and the cycle self-reinforces.

The Momo panic also intensified existing debates about platform responsibility, children’s internet safety, and the appropriate level of parental surveillance of children’s digital lives — all legitimate issues that were, paradoxically, poorly served by a manufactured crisis that distracted from the real and documented harms children face online.

Connection to Earlier Moral Panics

The Momo Challenge sits in a long tradition of moral panics about threats to children. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s convinced millions of Americans that daycare centers were fronts for Satanic ritual abuse — a claim supported by zero physical evidence but amplified by media coverage, law enforcement credulity, and therapists using now-discredited recovered memory techniques. The “razor blades in Halloween candy” panic has persisted for decades despite being almost entirely mythical. The “stranger danger” movement of the 1980s and 1990s dramatically overstated the risk of child abduction by strangers while diverting attention from the far more common danger of abuse by known adults.

Online, the pattern has specific precedents. The Blue Whale Challenge, originating in Russia in 2016, followed a strikingly similar arc — a supposed online “game” that led teenagers through 50 escalating challenges ending in suicide. Like Momo, the Blue Whale Challenge was amplified by media coverage far beyond any documented reality, though there were some confirmed incidents of teenagers creating Blue Whale groups after learning about the supposed challenge through news coverage. The Slender Man phenomenon — a fictional horror character created on the Something Awful forums in 2009 — took a darker turn in 2014 when two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin stabbed a classmate, claiming they did it for Slender Man. But Slender Man was never an organized challenge; it was internet folklore that two deeply troubled children latched onto.

The Momo Challenge stands out from these precedents in one important respect: it appears to have been almost entirely hollow from the start. The Blue Whale Challenge, while massively exaggerated, had some documented copycat activity. The Slender Man stabbing was a real, horrifying event. The Momo Challenge, by contrast, produced no confirmed victims, no confirmed videos, and no confirmed organized activity. It was pure signal, no substance — a panic about a thing that wasn’t there.

Timeline

• 2016: Keisuke Aiso creates Ubume (Mother Bird) sculpture for exhibition at Vanilla Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo
• 2016-2018: Photos of the sculpture circulate online, gradually becoming divorced from their artistic context
• July 2018: WhatsApp chain messages featuring the Momo image begin circulating in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, framing it as a dangerous “challenge”
• July 2018: Argentine authorities investigate a 12-year-old’s death for possible Momo connection; no definitive link established
• August 2018: Police departments in Buenos Aires and Mexico City issue warnings about the Momo Challenge
• August-September 2018: Latin American and Southeast Asian media cover the Momo phenomenon extensively
• Late 2018: Panic subsides temporarily as coverage cycle exhausts itself
• Late February 2019: UK tabloids report that Momo is being spliced into children’s YouTube videos; panic goes global within 48 hours
• February 27, 2019: Kim Kardashian posts about Momo to her 129 million Instagram followers
• February 28, 2019: YouTube states publicly they have found no evidence of Momo Challenge videos on their platform
• February-March 2019: Schools across UK, US, and Australia send warning letters to parents; police departments issue social media warnings
• March 2019: Fact-checkers (Snopes, Full Fact, PolitiFact) publish debunking articles
• March 1, 2019: The Atlantic publishes “The Momo Challenge Is Not Real” by Taylor Lorenz
• March 2019: UK Samaritans and child safety organizations warn that media coverage of Momo poses more risk to children than the non-existent challenge
• 2019: Keisuke Aiso reveals he has destroyed the Mother Bird sculpture
• 2019-present: “Momo Challenge” becomes a case study in internet moral panics and media amplification; the image becomes a meme

Sources & Further Reading

• Lorenz, Taylor. “The Momo Challenge Is Not Real.” The Atlantic, March 1, 2019
• YouTube Creators (@YouTubeCreators). Statement on Momo Challenge. Twitter, February 28, 2019
• Snopes. “Is the ‘Momo Challenge’ Linked to Deaths of Children?” Fact-check investigation, updated 2019
• Full Fact. “There Is No Confirmed Evidence the Momo Challenge Has Led to Any Deaths.” February 2019
• Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1972
• Samaritans. Statement on media reporting of the Momo Challenge. March 2019
• BBC News. “Momo Challenge: What Parents Need to Know.” February 2019
• The Guardian. “Momo Is Not Trying to Kill Children. So Why Are British Parents Terrified?” March 2019
• The Verge. “The Momo Challenge Hoax Is the Latest Example of a Viral Moral Panic.” March 2019
• Aiso, Keisuke (Link Factory). Interviews regarding the destruction of the Mother Bird sculpture, 2019

Related Theories

The Momo Challenge sits within a broader ecosystem of internet-era moral panics and digital anxiety. The Blue Whale Challenge follows a nearly identical pattern of media-amplified fear about a supposed online suicide game, while the Slender Man conspiracy explores how internet-born fiction can cross into real-world violence. The Dead Internet Theory addresses the broader existential anxiety about online authenticity that makes panics like Momo possible, and the design of social media algorithms creates the exact attention economy dynamics that incentivize the amplification of fear over facts.