A warning to all parents is: Do not believe everything you read! Gullibility is a social crime and sometimes the media as a whole tends to follow stories that are  “trending” with an almost herd-like mentality.

Fact checking is dumped in exchange for glorious sound bites, fantastic images and videos… As long as you have all that neatly bundled together, the story just has to be true, right?

So suddenly South Africa has a new media frenzy and as frenzies go, it ticks all the right boxes. “Our kids are in danger” and there are “hundreds of victims”. But take a step back and actually read what is being said.

Use your Mk1 eyeballs and actually read all the stories being reported!

Only one website claims the story to be true… All media, including newspaper reports, quote the one website (Russian site Novaya Gazeta), nothing more. Every single news report stems from the same suicide article published by the Novaya Gazeta. Worse, the original incidents date back to 2016, yet are reported as current.

Add a bad Anonymous video clip and it all has to be true, right?

I implore readers to think long and hard before blindly believing that the ‘facts’ around the Blue Whale game are even slightly true. The numbers just do not add up.

Some claims put the game’s suicide success rate as high as 300 teenagers.

Yet Russian authorities have noted no increase in teen suicides.

This is what snopes.com, a site that investigates hoax internet stories, has to say:

This story was inexplicably picked up months later by international tabloids (alongside claims that the game was spreading across the world), but we remain unable to verify any of the claims.

See full snopes report which lists the claims as unproven.

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