By JADA LEMOS
Staff Writer
The origin of The Blue Whale, otherwise known as The Blue Whale Challenge, began in 2015 when a Russian teenager, Rina Palenkova, posted a selfie on her social media account. In the photo, she’s standing outside with a black scarf wrapped around her mouth and nose, sticking her middle finger up at the camera. People assumed that she was covered in dried blood when she took the photo. The caption of the photo read : “Nya bye”. The next day, she took her own life.
The Blue Whale Challenge was reported as an online “suicide game” that was mostly aimed at teenagers. This challenge has around 50 tasks over 50 days, and has allegedly been linked to numerous deaths around the world. The tasks start off as very basic, such as “wake up in the middle of the night” or “watch a horror movie”, but after a while, the tasks start getting uncomfortable and scary. “Stand on the ledge of a tower block” and “Cut a whale into your arm” were some of the many creepy tasks that teenagers were forced to do, and the final task was always the same… “kill yourself”.
The Blue Whale Challenge started to become known to the public after two girls, Angelina Davydova and Diana Kuznetsova from the Russian city Ryazan, killed themselves around the same time. It was announced that both girls were a part of similar online groups, where they drew pictures of Rina Palenkova, posted about suicide, and mentioned blue whales numerous times. The Blue Whale Challenge comes from the fact that blue whales sometimes beach themselves, ultimately forcing themselves to die.
This year, it seems like this horrible suicide game has come back, but with a twist. There are many social media accounts that have been linked to this game. Their profiles are all the same, their profile pictures are a human version of Mickey Mouse, and their usernames are almost always “Johnathon Galindo”. It’s been said that these accounts belong to insanely good hackers, and will hack into anyone’s devices if their victim messages replies to their message. From that point, the victim is now going to be forced into doing the hacker’s demands. If the victim tries to object to doing anything, the hacker will find some way to threaten them, whether it’s their families, or anything precious to them.
The best thing to do if you get any message like this is to immediately block the person, or simply ignore the message as best you can. Sometimes, they’ll try and trick you into replying to them, but you can’t reply to them. If you don’t already have a private social media account, now might be the time to have one, just in case anything happens.
In conclusion, there really is no way to get rid of these hackers, since they can just create new social media accounts, but there are so many ways to prevent these things from starting back up to keep teenagers safe from the real dangers of social media.