The Momo Challenge: measuring the extent to which YouTube portrays harmful and helpful depictions of a suicide game

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents (15 to 29 years), who are in a life stage of exceptional vulnerability and susceptibility to depictions of non-suicidal self-injury and suicide. Allegedly, the suicide game Momo Challenge used this vulnerability to demand their players to perform self-harming dares and, ultimately, commit suicide. This study gives insight into the content, engagement rates and community formation of Momo Challenge videos on YouTube. We combine a network analysis (n = 209) with a manual content analysis of the videos (n = 105; 50%). Results show that more than two thirds of the videos include some form of harmful depiction. In addition, videos with a higher extent of harmful depictions are more likely to be engaged with, e.g., through likes (ρ = 0.332, p < 0.001). We discuss how YouTube has responded to the challenge and which implications arise for practice and theory

The role of affective and cognitive attitude extremity in perceived viewpoint diversity exposure

The current study examines the role of affective and cognitive attitude extremity on perceived exposure to diverse political viewpoints and investigates the possibility of a “primacy of affect.” Based on a multi-level analysis of panel survey data, we show that people with extreme attitudes toward immigrants experience less viewpoint diversity and that this tendency is especially pronounced for affective attitude extremity. However, even those holding extreme attitudes do not find themselves in issue-specific echo chambers, that is, they still encounter relatively diverse sets of viewpoints

Replication Data for: The Momo Challenge: Assessing the risks of suicide games on YouTube for adolescents

Allegedly, the online suicide game "Momo Challenge" dares players to perform self-harming tasks and, ultimately, commit suicide. Journalists have criticized the large amount of YouTube videos in which YouTubers promote the challenge by passing on the phone numbers to their viewers. However, empirical knowledge about this and similar cyber threats is lacking. This data set was created to give insight into the reach of the Momo Challenge on YouTube, how users form communities around this video material, and to what extent it puts them at risk. It contains the results of a data crawl with NodeXL. Using the keywords ‘Momo Challenge English’, I ran the crawl for titles, descriptions, and tags during the turn of 2018/2019. I identified 487 videos, which I manually cleansed of videos unrelated to the challenge. The remaining data set consists of 209 videos