Manila---The Philippine National Police (PNP) on Thursday
issued warning to parents and teachers to closely monitor children against the
purported "MOMO challenge" application that allegedly teaches kids to
do self-harm that leads to suicidal.
"Sa ating mga magulang kailangan po siguro bantayan
natin ang ating mga anak. Siguro ang kailangan dito is yung talagang magabayan
ang mga anak lalo na kapag sila ay wala sa atin, nandun sa mga schools. At sa
mga guro naman, isa na rin ito na isama nila yung tamang pagturo para maiwasan
itong mga suicidal thinking ng ating mga kabataan or etong mga challenges na
ginagawa through the internet," PNP chief Director General Oscar Albayalde
said in an ambush interview.
Credit Image: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Albayalde issued the warning amid reports of online danger
from the so-called "Momo Challenge.
The game played for about 50 days on messaging app WhatsApp,
Facebook and YouTube allegedly encourages children and teenagers of ages 6 to
14 years old to do specific tasks, following challenges starting light like
waking up in the middle of the night.
As the game progresses, the child will be tasked for more
dangerous and violent challenges until it leads to self-harm and suicide.
The PNP chief further stated that encouragement of doing
self-harm is a form of criminal act and can be held criminally liable.
"Remember, this is a crime lalung-lalo na kung ang bata
ang ini-enganyo," Albayalde pointed out.
The alleged harmful reports was first brought up in other
countries causing children to do harmful attacks to other people and ownself.
In the Philippines, incident of killing was also reported in
Quezon City wherein a 6-year old child died in school doing the act of suicide.
The mother told in an interview that while her kid was in
the ICU of the hospital, his son said "I will follow my master and I will
kill them all."
Out of instigated curiousity, the mother knew that during
exchange of messages of his son to his classmate and the search history in her
phone, the two brought up topics of dark web and suicidal acts.
In another incident, the mother released a statement that
same instance is happening to her child following the usage of alleged application.
"We did not stop probing him, to get an answer out of
him... He finally confessed that it asked him to kill 10 people or it will hurt
him. He was instructed not to tell to us because it was supposedly going to
hurt us if he did," the mother said.
Meanwhile, Google has also released a statement in its
homepage on the issue of the "Momo challenge" on behalf of its
subsidiary Youtube, that encourages people to report any form of its content to
fully safeguard the application exclusive for kids called the 'youtube kids'
app.
"Many of you have shared your concerns with us over the
past few days about the Momo Challenge--we’ve been paying close attention to
these reports. After much review, we’ve seen no recent evidence of videos
promoting the Momo Challenge on YouTube. Videos encouraging harmful and
dangerous challenges are clearly against our policies, the Momo challenge
included. Despite press reports of this challenge surfacing, we haven’t had any
recent links flagged or shared with us from YouTube that violate our Community
Guidelines," Google statement on Thursday morning.
"It’s important to note that we do allow creators to
discuss, report, or educate people on the Momo challenge/character on YouTube.
We’ve seen screenshots of videos and/or thumbnails with this character in them.
To clarify, it is not against our policies to include the image of the Momo
character on YouTube; that being said, this image is not allowed on the YouTube
Kids app and we’re putting safeguards in place to exclude it from content on
YouTube Kids," it further stated.
YouTube Kids, developed by Youtube and released in 2015, was
created "to make it safer and simpler" for kids to explore the world
through online video was also embedded with whole suite of parental controls, that
tailors the experience to family’s needs.
"If you see someone promoting any challenge with an
inherent risk or harm, please flag it to us immediately," it further
added.
Youtube, however has also made its statement on Twitter,
Thursday morning with a condensed version of google's statement that goes:
"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."
According to experts, the MOMO challenge app was first
established in 2016 to a closely related game named Blue Whale challenge with
the instruction of harming people and suicidal tasks.
The physical feature of the MOMO, which has a frightful
appearance was came from a famous sculpture of museum in Japan.
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