Falling prey to a game of death: Blue Whale Challenge shows the ugly underbelly of the Internet

When one was just coming to grips with the havoc cyberbullying causes in the lives of teens, even prompting suicides, here comes the ‘game’ Blue Whale, a viral challenge that has claimed the lives of over a hundred teens. So what is Blue Whale? This ‘game’, it is said, was created by Philipp Budeikin, a 22-year-old former psychology student from Russia, now incarcerated for inciting the suicide of as many as 17 teenage girls. As with most things viral, although the creator of this game is behind bars, this sinister challenge that brainwashes vulnerable teens and leads them to their death by their own hands is found in several countries. Most recently, the suicide of a teenage boy in Mumbai has been linked to this ‘game’.

It is now amidst us, this underbelly of the Internet that is reaching out to vulnerable teens, who are online but not quite mature enough to process all the information out there. In the adult world, our preoccupations with social media are different; we have privacy concerns, cybercrime issues, stalking and trolling, yet, at all times, even when we are victims of perverse online behaviour, we are still in control.

Blue Whale is at a whole other level. Its primary objective is to wrest that control away from young people and lead them to their death. Over a 50-day period, teens are initiated into this online death cult by being asked to perform different tasks on each day, till the last one, which is to take their own life. There is some resonance between the online experience of adults and teens; mostly, it is the need to seek and find validation from others, even strangers.

It could be a post on Instagram, or a comment on Twitter, or a task commanded by a Blue Whale admin, the attention that online presence craves seems to bind all age groups to this daily addiction. Maybe, the challenge that Blue Whale poses for us (this is no app that can be banned or uninstalled since its administrators lurk on social media and in chatrooms, seeking out teens especially with low self-esteem issues) is the need for all of us to acknowledge our increasingly toxic dependence on social media; especially since these kinds of addictions are mostly learnt behaviour. Hence kids get it from us. As we increasingly make more space for the Internet and social media in our lives, we open the doors to strangers and their sinister motives.

For those of us who came of age during the same time as the Internet, it was a window opening into the wider world, a repository of information and people ‘like us’ who we would never meet in our everyday lives. It may as well have come gift-wrapped with a bow on it! But since then, a lot has changed, the information age is leading to a need for an information purge. I’m not suggesting anyone turn a Luddite, that’s an impossibility for most of us, but we have to start looking at our online behaviour and dependence, much in the way that we would view any other addiction. And if you have kids, it becomes even more pertinent, since it is learned behaviour, from peers and adults in one’s life that mutate into an addiction. How old are kids when they get their first smart phone? Is it allowed at the dining table? Are there hours, like we had back in the day with television viewing? These are questions that most parents ask and address, but now one has the greater need, with ‘games’ like the Blue Whale in our midst to track social media behaviour. Countries that are already dealing with this menace have asked schools to open the conversation with parents about this game. Furthermore, with tasks like ‘cutting’ involved, parents have been advised to observe their wards more carefully, for physical signs, emotional and behavioural changes — remember all these happen within a 50-day period, a little less than eight weeks, and the changes will be perceptible. As the child moves along this challenge, sleeping patterns will be disturbed, along with a spike in ‘alone time’.

And, lastly, as the virtual world becomes more real, there is a greater need to emphasise upon its unrealness. The Internet today mangles the old idiom of “birds of a feather stick together”, beseeching us to be careful of who we consider as people ‘like us’ and be willing to come unstuck.

The author is an established writer and screenwriter