Momo, deep web, chans: the hidden dangers of the internet for children

After putting her daughter, Lara, 4 years old, to bed, Rio de Janeiro chemical engineer Rosana Cintra, 36, also went to bed. As she occasionally does when sleep doesn’t come, she decided to check her cell phone. It was already dawn, and she noticed an abnormal volume of messages in the WhatsApp group of college friends who, like her, are mothers. “I imagined that some good gossip was going on and I went straight to see it, wanting to be part of it”, she recalls.

When opening the conversation, however, he was faced with the image of a scary doll, with bulging eyes, pale skin and a sinister smile, which appeared in a video that Lara and many of the girl’s friends love to watch, the Baby Shark. “It wasn’t just pictures, but a perfect animation in which Momo, that creepy character, came and went, with images of razor blades, teaching how to cut himself.”

That night, Rosana became one of thousands of mothers who, through groups on chat apps, had access to a creepypasta🇧🇷 This is the name given to horror stories whose authorship is almost always unknown, treated as legends, and spread through cybernetic means. These are stories like those of the famous blonde from the bathroom long ago, which now take on other contours and spaces.

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About Momo, the doll that encouraged young children to commit suicide, what was said at the time is that the video would be hosted on YouTube Kids, an application on the video platform aimed at little ones. YouTube rushed to release a note clarifying that the information that the content would be in the children’s space was not correct. “I only calmed down when Lara woke up. I showed her the image, and she assured me that she had never seen that doll,” says Rosana, who still restricted the girl’s online access, allowing movies and drawings only through the Netflix platform.

In the case of Marcela*, a 35-year-old banker from Minas Gerais, her 7-year-old daughter’s response was different. “Almost in tears, she told me and her dad that Momo appeared in the middle of a slime video,” she recalls. Faced with the girl’s statement, she tried to identify the animation in the history of media watched on YouTube. She couldn’t, so she ended up forbidding her children to touch any electronic device without supervision.

Momo who?

The character Momo is already well known on YouTube, even before the recent Brazilian controversy. Its appearance in children’s videos began in mid-2018 in Ireland and the United States and then moved to Argentina and Colombia, always in similar contexts, encouraging children to take their own lives.

According to Clarissa Orberg, YouTube’s children’s and educational content partnerships manager, the animations spread very quickly over here, perhaps due to the fact that WhatsApp is used more in Brazil than in other locations. Clarissa categorically states that the videos released on WhatsApp were never on adult YouTube or Kids, an application that only hosts content considered suitable for children under 13 years old. “No user was able to find a link or page for the video on our platform,” she says. “We figured that because it was a video, it was automatically associated with YouTube,” she explains.

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Even though it is an open and collaborative platform, where anyone can publish audiovisual material, YouTube has rules and filters – some automatic, with artificial intelligence, and others by human reviewers – to try to stop inappropriate content. When it comes to material for children, these filters are redoubled. The version for minors also offers the possibility of measuring and defining how long the child stays online, automatically disconnecting after the stipulated limit. Finally, you can also lock the search feature.

super connected childhood

In April of this year, an Ibope survey revealed that Brazilian children are the ones who spend the most time online compared to children from other countries. In Brazil, young Internet users between the ages of 2 and 11 spend up to 17 hours a month on the internet, an average above that recorded in France, for example, where children spend around ten hours and 37 minutes on the net.

The collective hysteria provoked by the appearances of the Momo doll and fueled by previous stories, such as the deodorant challenge or the Blue Whale challenge, which also incited children to play games that threatened life, reignited the discussion about this generation’s relationship with the internet. And, furthermore, it showed the enormous lack of knowledge that most adults still have about the dark spaces of the network, the paths to a safe experience and the legislation to deal with inappropriate content.

“The internet is today what TV was for many in the 1980s, practically a baby monitor”, points out psychotherapist Monica Pessanha, from São Paulo. This is a clear reflection of the busy life most parents lead. Monica often hears in her office complaints from adults about the exaggerated use of electronic devices in childhood.

What happens is that the cell phone’s mesmerizing screen is usually a great ally to distract the little ones when parents need to solve something that prevents them from paying attention to their children at that moment or are simply exhausted, looking for a rest. And it is in these situations that two dangers reside, the lack of balance in permission for use and the lack of monitoring what is being seen.

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“We cannot demonize the use of the internet. But it is necessary to teach children not to be dependent on the virtual world and to navigate it safely”, she says. Ideally, little ones should not be exposed to screens before the age of 2, as recommended by the Brazilian Society of Pediatrics. And, from that age up to 5 years old, the limit should not exceed one hour a day or include content with violent practices, such as games with weapons that kill or injure, for example.

learning to teach

If motherhood already seemed challenging in the past, technology has added an additional difficulty to the mission of educating. “Adults themselves are still exploring this territory”, says lawyer Alessandra Borelli, specialist in digital law and co-founder of Nethics, an education company focused on the safe use of the internet for children and adolescents, in São Paulo. “In addition to parents not having basic digital education, they often lack clear and comprehensive information to update them with each new episode like this”, she adds.

Like mothers Rosana and Marcela, faced with something negative, like Momo’s story, the tendency among parents is to choose to limit or prohibit access to the internet altogether. “Watching the articles about Momo on television, I heard names like the deep web, something I never knew existed or that it was possible to access”, reports Rosana. “I confess that I still don’t quite understand how it works. But, when in doubt, Lara now only watches the cartoons on Netflix in a child profile created for her.”

Marcela’s husband deleted the YouTube Kids app from his cell phone, installed months before to entertain his daughter in traffic on her way back from school. “Even though he followed the security settings, after Momo he was never convinced there was nothing there. And we prefer that she no longer access anything that is open content”, says the banker.

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Although services like YouTube and other collaborative content networks and platforms show effort in controlling what is published, there is no total guarantee that someone with malicious intent will not bypass the filters to upload something that should not have been approved. There, both in the space for adults and in the children’s space, official channels and professionally made content and home-made productions by ordinary users are in the same basket. Therefore, it is entirely up to the parents to curate what can be seen by the child. Another delicate point, the advertising that appears before the videos on YouTube Kids, for example, is only avoided if the family signs a package that blocks the display of advertising.

shared responsibility

For Alessandra Borelli, transferring this responsibility only to the parents is complex and ineffective for the safety of a generation that is born ultra-connected and will inevitably have early contact with technology. Content providers also need to make a commitment to security. “When you offer access to borderless communication, you have to account for 100% of the risk,” she says. According to Alessandra, it is unreasonable to assume that there will always be an enlightened mother or father, in a position to establish additional control so that their children do not access something inappropriate and dangerous. “If the guidance is not comprehensible to everyone, if illiterate parents won’t understand it, then the company should review it to make it inclusive”, she evaluates.

The demand for stricter security policies has advanced in some countries. In the UK, from July, new guidelines will come into force to protect children online. In addition to forcing some online services – from game apps to toys that allow connection – to exclude rewards or effort techniques, such as the famous likes, to gain greater relevance on platforms, it now requires extra proof of age to access pornographic content. Those who do not comply with the new parameters may face blocking access to their platforms by the government.

In Brazil, content companies have channels for receiving complaints. And it is up to the Public Ministry to guarantee the defense of the rights of children and adolescents and, in this context, propose civil actions against platforms that display something inappropriate for this public.

Paths to a positive experience

Parents of teenagers are also struggling with the online world. Although young people’s discernment in the face of threats is greater, the risks also increase. Recent crimes, such as the Suzano massacre, in Greater São Paulo, when two young people murdered schoolmates and employees, popularized terms such as deep web and dark web, layers of the internet to which few people have access.

The content created in these environments is illegal, including the exaltation of extremist and violent movements, such as Nazism. Inappropriate topics are discussed in forums, the chans, difficult to be tracked, complicating the attempt to denounce or remove the material. The biggest danger, however, is not that teenagers access this part of the internet – after all, it is not an easy task – but that the content reaches the surface, in places that are easily accessible. Far beyond knowing the paths and intricacies of the internet, it is in the offline relationships between parents and children that the premises reside for establishing a healthy routine in the online environment.

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