Beware The Whale

A DEADLY new online trend has emerged. Parents, take heed.

- Robert Clunie

IT is a symptom of our time. We have a tech savvy youth glued to all sorts of electronic doodads and their likely tech-detox seems all too far off. Yes, meeting people has been revolutionised, and it’s opened the door to some astounding developments...but social media has also left that door open for more malevolent ideas to slip through – ideas that prove detrimental to those with impressionable minds. Case in point, the Blue Whale Challenge; and it’s sinister to say the vey least. 

The ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ or the ‘Blue Whale Suicide Game’ is said to have permeated from Russia into other territories around the world. It is a form of social media conduction that reared its nefarious head in May of last year when the mother of a 12-year-old girl found signs of the game on her social media accounts after her suicide. The finer details as to this Simon-says-like phenomenon are still few and far between. What we do know is that there appear to be in existence so-called online ‘death squads’, or ‘suicide squads’, who monitor social media looking for vulnerable or mentally unstable users to target. The victim, referred to as the ‘participant’, is contacted and assigned a ‘curator’, the individual who actually makes contact. Over a period of 50 days, this ‘curator’ assigns his ‘participator’ a series of tasks, the culmination of which is suicide. (The tasks themselves have been listed in the sidebar on the opposite page; please be aware that they are considerably disturbing.)