Phil Bradley's weblog

Resources for Bram Stoker month

On one of my courses recently a delegate told me that she was going to be running a Bram Stoker month in November. He was born on November 8th 1847, so this will be the 170th anniversary of his birth. I thought that was a splendid idea, and over the weekend I put together a bunch of resources that might be helpful to anyone else doing something similar. You're welcome to use any, all or none of them, or to take the ideas and create entirely different things.

A Symbaloo page. If you visit https://www.symbaloo.com/mix/bramstoker you'll see a mix of a dozen or more links to Bram Stoker and Dracula websites. If you use Symbaloo (it's free!) you can take a copy of the mix and use it yourself, adding in your own links as appropriate until you've got a really nice collection of places that you can point your users towards. 

A Google map. I put together a map of places around the world that are appropriate either for Bram Stoker's life, or which relate to episodes in Dracula. Again, you are free to take a copy of it and you can edit it for yourself. I just did a bare bones approach, so there are plenty of opportunities to add in more links, photographs, more content and so on. It's available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=15_EAIb_CzGMbWAOXEDtnV2Ss_A4&usp=sharing

Trading cards. I used the excellent Big Huge Labs site to create a set of trading cards. They are designed to be used as Top Trumps. It's a two player game, one playing Van Helsing, and the other Dracula. Each player chooses a card of their choice and choose the criteria you'll use. Match your number to that chosen on both cards, and the winner takes the losers card. Alternatively, they can 'save' one of their other characters that's already been captured. The winner is the one who captures all of their opponents cards. There's a complete set in my Flickr album, but here's a couple of examples. 

You could print a whole series of them off - a set will easily fit on a page of A4, laminate and give them out.

Dracula Quote. I used Quozio to produce a nice little poster of one of Dracula's more interesting quotes - this is also available in the Flickr collection as well.

There's also a magazine cover that I created again using the BigHugeLabs site. You could put in your own photograph - perhaps of your own library? Given that you'll just have had Halloween you might be able to get some 'spooky' shots you could use.

There's also plenty of opportunities for funny images as well, so I used a Keep Calm and Carry on template to create a different type of poster:

You could use that, or come up with your own slogan - perhaps take a photograph of a member of staff in Dracula type outfit and use that as your lead image?

I produced a word cloud using Tagxedo, which is an excellent little tool. I just used the Wikipedia page for Bram Stoker - I was in a bit of a rush so didn't edit out as many of the useless words as I could have done, so you might want to redo it yourself, and change the colours - the shape was from Tagxedo, but you could always put your own in.

Finally I created a little movie, using the Google photos movie creation app. I'm sure that you could do better than my attempt however! 

 

All of the images above are, as I say, available in my Flickr Album. Feel free to use it, or create your own from the ideas that I've put together. 

Anagram search engine

I’ve mentioned the Stands4 network in the past – they are a company that specialises in creating small, very niche search tools, such as Lyrics, Poetry, Biographies and Symbols. Their latest is Anagrams and Scrambles at http://www.anagrams.net/ and they have listed a lot of anagrams by subject. So for example in the category of ‘Classic writers anagrams’ we learn that an anagram of Thomas Hardy is ‘shy hot drama’ and for Mark Twain is ‘twin karma’. It’s also possible to search ‘back to front’ as it were to see that ‘midnight kicks’ is an anagram for Dick King Smith. As well as searching their database for anagrams you can of course input your own words to see if the service can create them for you. It’s a nice tool for crossword puzzlers and for the rest of us when we need the perfect piece of trivia.

Boolify for easier searching; great for kids as well

There used to be a really good site called Boolify several years ago, which had a drag and drop approach to building searches. You simply clicked on a building block such as 'word' or 'not' and dropped it into the work area, adding in your terms as you went. The search was then mirrored for you in a search box, and was then executed. Boolify died but has been taken over and resurrected by Kidzsearch and you can find it on their website here: https://www.kidzsearch.com/boolify/ It's still very simple to use, though it can be a little bit fiddly to get the blocks in the right order, and it does add in unnecessary double quotes, but it's a good approach to getting children (and maybe novice adult searchers) to think about search construction. The limitation as far as adults are concerned is that it does only search the children's search engine, which isn't a criticism, just an observation. I've attached a screenshot, so you can see exactly what I mean.

Google's idea of a cure for cancer? Carrot juice.

It's very tempting to search for your symptoms and other related medical information on Google, but you need to warned; Google isn't exactly accurate with the stuff that it brings back. A search for 'cure for cancer' brings us back lots of interesting stuff, but the top result is from a site called Cancer Tutor, which I'm not going to link to, because it's full of crap. I'll copy a little of what it says however:

Many people have cured their newly diagnosed cancer by using a very healthy diet and drinking a quart of carrot juice (with a little beet juice mixed in) every day. That is all they did.

In fact, if all cancer patients did that instead of using chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, the “cure rate” for cancer in America would jump dramatically.

But who would make huge profits telling cancer patients to drink a quart of carrot juice, mixed with a little beet juice, every day, and eat a healthy diet? Certainly not the medical community and certainly not the pharmaceutical industry and media. Carrot juice and beet juice cannot be patented. Nor can a healthy diet be patented.

The general public is so brainwashed they think Nature is too stupid to be a medical doctor. Yet scientists only understand about 3 percent of human DNA after studying it since 1953. This means scientists still don't have a clue what 97 percent of all human DNA does.

So there you have it. Carrot juice. You can see the link from the screenshot that I grabbed:

Now, there's plenty of useful information on the page as well of course, but there's no getting away from the fact that Google has this as the #1 result. We've seen this happen time and time again with Google; it wasn't so long ago that a search for the reason that the dinosaurs became extinct lead us to the #1 result from an American right wing Christian website, also spouting all sorts of nonsense. Just another reason why 'don't trust Google' should be top of your list of things to say to novice searchers! There's a little more on the story from the Search Engine Roundtable website.

Delicious bought by Pinboard and shuttered

For those with long memories, Delicious was one of the sites to use; it allowed people to bookmark their favourite websites for ease of access. At the time of founding, in 2003 Delicious was a real innovation, as the idea of being able to quickly and easily put stuff onto a third party website and then share that with your friends and colleagues was a really new idea. However, Delicious was unable to keep up with the times as other sites such as Diigo came along to give it real competition. It was sold several times - Yahoo paid between $15-$30,000,000 for it, but as usual with Yahoo! they really didn't know what they had and people began to migrate to other services, in particular Pinboard which has finally completed its victory, buying the ailing service for an astonishingly low $35,000. 

If you're still a Delicious user then you will need to find yourself a new place to keep your bookmarks; I'd suggest Diigo if you want free, or you could go across to Pinboard and move your collection over, but it will cost you $11 a year for the privilege. Delicious will remain up for viewing, but you won't be able to add anything new. You can read more in the Pinboard blog entry, but in all honesty, you won't because you're not using Delicious any longer. 

Shame to see it go, but it had outlived its purpose and was badly used by people who thought they had a cash cow on their hands. 

Expert Internet Searching 5th Edition

I'm pleased to say that this book is now with the publishers, Facet Publishing and should be available in about 3 months. This is (as the title of the blog post says) the 5th edition of the title which started life in 1999 as The Advanced Internet Searcher's Handbook. That very first edition didn't even mention Google, which seems almost impossible to imagine. This edition references over 300 different search engines and associated tools. As usual I've started from scratch with it, and while keeping to the same format have added and removed content in almost equal measure. The book is in 13 chapters:

1. An introduction to the internet. While it's not necessary to really introduce the internet to anyone these days I still go into details about how the development and organisation of the internet affects internet search. I'm also able to look back over 17 years of the internet and look at how it's changed over that period of time.
2. An introduction to search engines. I look at how search engines work, how they collect data and arrange it, as well as looking in detail at about a dozen different types of engines.
3. The world according to Google. The good, bad and indifferent of the search engine. I go into detail about how to use it to its best advantage, and also provide lots of reasons why it's a really bad idea to trust it at all.
4. Other free text search engines. Alternatives to Google, and reasons why I think one of the best of them is quite probably one you've never heard of.
5. Directory, clustering and similarity search engines. There's lots of different types of search engines out there, and this chapter explores a few of them
6. Multi- and meta search engines. When one search engine simply isn't enough, you need as much information as possible!
7. Social media search engines. This is a developed and developing area, so I look in detail at some of the key engines you need to search the social media environment
8. Visual and image search engines. The internet is increasingly becoming a visual arena, and we need to consider other ways of finding content. This chapter looks at doing that from a visual standpoint.
9. People based resources. People finders, email search engines, finding people on social media and more!
10. News based search engines. As news becomes 24/7 and more importantly is about a second old, how can we find all the new material that we need to keep up to date? How do we deal with the pernicious problem of fake news?
11. Multimedia search engines. Video specific, educational, audio and podcast engines are the focus of this chapter
12. Specialised search engines. I look at academic engines, why there are no good ones for children, and other specialised engines
13. Hints, tips and the future. How to get the most out of the search engines, quick shortcuts and getting the most out of your browser.

I'm really pleased with this new edition, and I think it's the best one yet. It's aimed at anyone who wants to improve their search abilities and to become quicker and more effective when it comes to getting good material quickly and easily. I've written it with the intention that it's the kind of book that should sit on your desk or nearby shelf so that you can refer to it when you need to. Read it through, dip in and out if you prefer; I've tried to make it both informative but fun to read. I hope you enjoy it!

The dangers of being lax with email addresses

I had an interesting experience today. I got an email sent to my philb@philb.com address telling me that a direct debit to a specific bank account at a specific bank had been set up. My initial response is to complete ignore this as a phishing attempt. However, there were no links to grab my details and the email address from which the email was sent seemed accurate. A few minutes later I got another email addressed to the same account telling me that my account with a 'Groupon' type account had been set up. 

I decided to explore, so went to the site and tried to log in, and of course it told me my password (which I made up on the spot) was wrong, and offered to send me a link to reset it. I agreed and within a couple of minutes I had reset the password and logged into the account. I was then able to see information about who owned it; it was a Phil Bxxxx (name excised to limit embarrassment). I went back through my emails searching for the name and had got an email from a mail order firm cancelling an order to the person with the same name, only this gave me his address. It was the matter of a couple of moments to check this, find out that he runs some websites which linked by name to the Groupon type site, and it also gave me his phone number.

I now had his name, address, phone number, details of his bank, and part of his account number. That's a pretty long way down the road to being able to impersonate him. So I rang him up. I explained who I was, and how I had got as much of his information as I had, and what was going on please? This is where it gets really insane. He's a tech guy who works for a particular company which I won't name, and he was responsible for setting up systems for members of the public to join, and in this specific case get loyalty points and rewards for purchases. So I asked him why he was using my email address? He replied - I didn't think it existed, I just made it up! Seriously? He's email personal details to email accounts that he doesn't know, hasn't checked, and has no way of checking? Moreover, his company is not employed 2 stage verification of email accounts - anyone who had any clue as to what they were doing should have set up a system that emailed my email address and said 'did you really want to set this account up?' I could then have ignored it and got on with the rest of my day. 

I remain gobsmacked.

Blue Whale Update

I'd hoped that the nonsense about the 'Blue whale' suicide game had been a flash in the pan, but it's continuing to be spread. The Daily Mail ran another story on it on May 10th and it's about the 'mastermind' behind it; Philipp Budeikin, who I mentioned in my previous blog post; Blue Whale suicide game or hoax? I don't think there's any doubt that this guy is one very sick individual, and it does look as though he created at least 8 social media groups on the Russian version of Facebook, VKontackte with the express purpose of preying on children. However, that doesn't mean that he invented a game at all, but it's far easier to hook a story on that concept than to have to explain how social media groups work. 

The Daily Mail article is full of inaccuracies, vague accounts and hysteria. There is a reference to Angelina Davydova, 12, who fell to her death from the 14th floor of an apartment block on Christmas Day 2015. Now, there are plenty of people with that name, but I couldn't find any mention of one who killed herself, other than in newspaper reports that quoted the Daily Mail article. What's interesting however is that almost a year previously, on 26th May 2016 the same picture of the girl Angelina is used, but in that story she's referred to as 'Elya Davydova' and the story is all about Russian suicide sites, with NO mention of the Blue Whale 'game'. Either the Mail is guilty of sloppy journalism, or perhaps it thinks we'll be more sympathetic towards a girl with a more Westernised name? 

There's reference to a girl only referred to as 'Anna K'  who according to the Mail hung herself after becoming obsessed with 'the game'. However, Russian newspapers (I've just linked to one) make no reference to how she died, or to any game at all. The inference is that she was just a very confused young woman. The Mail also talks about a girl called Vilena Piven, but again, newspaper reports refer to her being involved with an online suicide group, but there's no reference again to the 'Blue Whale game'. 

The Mail also shows a screenshot of a girl and says "A harrowing photo showing a young girl some seconds before jumping down from a roof". I've searched for this image and the only place I can see it is as a thumbnail for 7 YouTube videos, but she doesn't appear in any of the videos. The Mail also uses typically vague phrases such as "A disturbing video purports to show one Russian girl jumping to her death"  and "it is feared in Russia that dozens have done so at the bidding of Budeikin or other 'mentors". So - no facts, just sensational scaremongering. However, there's plenty more. They say that Budeikin is also known as "Philipp Lis (meaning Fox)". It's true, that surname does mean Fox - but only in Polish. There's no indication that he is Polish, so the reference is pointless, except to further their sensationalism. The Mail also goes on to say that he's getting dozens of love letters from girls, and the Russian authorities are powerless to stop him receiving them. Really? (At this point I should say that I've not had the opportunity of checking out Russian law on what prisoners are allowed to receive, but let's just say that I'm very skeptical.)

Now - to be clear, I'm not suggesting that this guy hasn't done what is claimed - that he has been culpable in the deaths of young Russian woman. However, what I am saying is that there is no reference at all to the 'Blue Whale game' until newspapers started to provide sensationalist coverage of it. Certainly the Mail didn't reference it last year with the piece that they wrote. As a 'game' it's an invention. It's easier to scare parents by using a game concept - but it's also dangerous, because parents will assume that a game can be downloaded as an app, or played online. If they discuss things with their children, it's going in the wrong direction to talk about a game, and a child can very easily deflect attention to their mental health by saying they haven't played any such game or downloaded it. Far from protecting children it's going the other way entirely. 

Moving away from the current scare, I also have an update on conversations that I had previously. I had little luck speaking to the Essex Safeguarding Children Board, so I wrote to them, and got a reply from the Independent Chair. He told me that the board has NOT issued any information about it, which appears to completely contradict what one Deputy Head teacher told me, so someone is getting very confused. he also said 'I am not critical of any local organisations which have sent out such bulletins or tried to raise awareness'.  He goes on; 'busy managers do not have the opportunity to verify all of the information that comes to their attention, particularly when it is already widely available'. This I find astonishing; apparently children's safety isn't worth the time it takes to run a quick check on Google to at least raise a question of authenticity, which could then be raised with another appropriate member of staff, such as the librarian, who could check it in detail. The fact that enough people are spreading fake news and false accounts makes it perfectly acceptable for other people to do so as well. 

Now, does this really matter? I contend that it does. Not only for the reason that I previously mentioned; it allows deflection in a discussion with a child, but it also illustrates to children that adults are not capable of independently checking and verifying information for themselves. Rather than setting themselves up as good examples of information literate internet users they're doing the opposite. Children are not stupid, and they can quickly work out things for themselves, and this will just help confirm that fake news is an acceptable part of life today, because after all, if their teachers are spreading it, it can't be that bad, surely? (My opinion, backed up with discussions that I've had with young people so feel free to ignore!)

If we want children to grown up with good levels of information literacy, an understanding of how to access and verify information we don't achieve this by demonstrating knee jerk reactions to sensationalist stories in the press which are written to get readers, not be accurate. 

Facial recognition search.

Facial recognition software really is a thing, and we'll see a lot more of it in the next couple of years. It has absolutely huge implications that I can't even work through myself at the moment, but let's see what we've got already. The first of two tools that I'm going to look at is the 'Celebrity model' site. The idea behind this is... well, let them tell it. I quote: "The 'Celebrity' model analyzes images and returns probability scores on the likelihood that the media contains the face(s) of over 10,000 recognized celebrities. This model is great for anyone building an app that relies on celebrity comparisons." So you could, I suppose, throw photographs at it and see if any of them turn out to be a celebrity. That's great if you're photographing people on a red carpet and have no idea if the person you've snapped is a real celebrity, hanger on, member of staff or whatever. The example that they gave was a full face image of the actor Morgan Freeman, and their software said that it thought it was him with a probability of 99.1% which I think is pretty good. Of course, they're going to use a good example, and not everyone is going to be face on in an image, but nonetheless. However, what's intriguing is that you can provide them with your own photograph and it will try and work out which celebrity you look most like. Just upload a picture and it instantly comes back with a response. Here's mine:

It seems to think that I look a bit like Jeff Bezos, and it's got a probability of 3%. This is actually good, because clearly I'm not, but the photographs do show a reasonable similarity, yet the recognition package knows I'm not him. That's interesting enough, but I hadn't even noticed a photograph of a woman in the background - I was at the opticians checking out new glasses and yet the package saw another face and reckons there's a 17% chance it's a model who I have never heard of, but I got a picture of her in a similar pose, and I can work out why it thinks it's her. 

The second recognition package, which I'm NOT going to screenshot is from a website called Mega cams at https://megacams.me/. I am NOT linking directly to this - you can cut and paste if you want, but as a word of warning, this is an adult webcam chat site with very adult imagery from the outset. People in various stages of undress will chat and well... you can work out the rest yourself. What you can do here is as they put it 'find your live sex doppelganger'. The idea, which is tacky in the extreme is to upload an image of your partner, ex, someone you fancy etc and see if you can find one of their webcam models who looks similar. Again, you can guess the rest. I tried it a couple of times and I have to say it's good. By which I mean it's accurate. The pictures of the webcam models that it returned did, with a slight stretch of the imagination, look like the people whose pictures I uploaded.

This stuff is obviously still at a very early stage, but I have to say that it's scarily accurate and will only get more so in the next few years. Take a photograph of people in a crowd, run it through one of these and if the software can link to Facebook profiles you're going to have a fairly good chance of seeing who those people are. There's a whole world of mis-use there. People search is going to get much more interesting in the coming few years!

Blue Whale suicide game or hoax?

I was first made aware of the 'Blue Whale game' when a concerned parent posted on Facebook a letter that she'd seen from a local school, warning parents about the 'Blue Whale game', which was apparently the cause of hundreds of suicides of young people in Russia, which was on its way to the UK. A second school in my area, then a third sent out the same kind of warning, and another in Basildon also sent letters to parents, based on a discussion with Essex police. The BBC have posted their own article about it, and it's been mentioned in a variety of newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, The Sun and The Metro. The headlines are worrying, to say the least.

"‘Blue Whale’ suicide game linked to 130 teen deaths makes its way to UK",

"Police and schools in chilling warning of ‘Blue Whale’ suicide game that is feared to be heading for the UK and is linked to teen deaths"

"Social media suicide game blamed for deaths of 100 children as parents warned to be vigilant."

"Police warn Blue Whale 'suicide' Facebook game linked to 130 teen deaths in Russia is heading to the UK"

You'll notice that the stories are already inconsistent - 100 or 130? Children or teenagers? My first thought is to head to Snopes and see what they have to say. Their conclusion so far is that it's 'unproven', which isn't as clear cut as Fake, but I'll explain why shortly. Before we get into the nitty gritty, let's take a step back and look at the situation in Russia.

Child suicide in Russia.

To be honest, it's bleak. According to Suicide.org Russia has one of the highest suicide rates in the world; their list of international suicide rates places Russia at #3 behind Luthuania and Belarus. The UK is #62. The number of suicides per 100,000 by age group in Russia is 25.8 for the age group 15-24, and in 2012 the rate of teenage suicide was three times higher than the world average.  (The links go to the WHO and the New York Times). According to the Russian government, 720 minors committed suicide in 2016. Authorities say the main causes are unrequited love, family problems, and mental-health issues. Lack of opportunity and widespread alcoholism and drug abuse are cited as contributing factors. Only 0.6 percent have any connection to the Internet or social media. Interestingly however, articles about the suicides often refer to the fact that they come from happy and stable homes. This may well be true, but on the other hand, it's a far more interesting story, and gives credence to 'victim status' rather than saying that they've killed themselves because of a miserable and difficult home life. However you cut it though, child suicide in Russia is far from uncommon. The Daily Mail for example called them 'happy and normal'. 

Many of the articles refer to young girls who have killed themselves, and there's no doubt that they have actually committed suicide, either by jumping off tall buildings or by walking in front of a train. However, it's at this point when things start to get very confused. There is reference to a teenager Rina Palenkova, (or Renata Kambolina or Rita Palenkova) aged 17 who ran in front of a train in November 2015 and the Daily Mirror states “Police said she had problems with her boyfriend”. Numerous newpapers refer to two girls who have committed suicide by falling to their deaths from a 14 storey apartment block, Yulia Konstantinova, 15, and Veronika Volkova, 16. However, there are questions over the reasons for their suicides; they had been posting depressed and suicidal thoughts to their social media accounts. What is clear is that I haven't found a single account that can categorically be laid at the door of the Blue Whale game. Not a single one. Newspaper reports are very vague with their terminology 'investigators claim', 'some parents claim' and so on, but nothing substantiated.

However, it's very clear that something has been going on in Russia. A May 2016 story from the Russian site Novaya Gazeta reported dozens of suicides of children in Russia during a six-month span, asserting that some of the people who had taken their lives were part of the same online game community on VK.com, a social media network based out of St. Petersburg, Russia. Novaya Gazeta  reported that “at least” eighty of the suicides were linked to these “blue whale” games, but an investigation by Radio Free Europe found that no suicides had been definitively linked to these online communities. Specifically “not a single death in Russia or Central Asia has been definitively tied to Blue Whale”. The Daily Mail wrote an article based on this story in May 2016, asserting that the children were part of the same online game community on VK.com a social media network based out of St Petersburg. It's worth stressing here that an online game community is not the same as playing a specific game. On November 16^th Philipp Budeikin, (or Filipp Budeykin) a 21 year old was detained on organising 8 social network groups between 2013-16 to ‘promote suicide’, but again, this isn't related to a specific game. 

Recent news items

Coming up to date the idea that it's a game which has caused these suicides has resurfaced. Daily Mail published a story on 26 April, which was basically a rehash of the one they published almost a year earlier. Interestingly there is a picture of a whale supposedly cut into an arm, with a copyright to The Siberian Times, but the image isn’t on the Siberian Times website at all. I've not seen any other images, and I'm doubtful that it's actually real; it's very easy to fake an arm cutting. I would have thought that if hundreds of children have been involved with this 'game' there would be many more images than a single one. The TES published an article on the 25th April which is quite frankly laughable in its ineptitude. They make reference to "A descriptive account of the game, posted to a forum dedicated to creepypasta – horror stories and urban legends intended to scare readers – suggests that the master always knows whether or not the tasks have been accomplished." The 'forum' is actually the name of the person who posted a story, and his posting history is all about murders, suicides and death. Far from being a definitive account it's an amateur piece of fiction. The article goes on to make other vague and unsubstantiated claims. "A spokesman for Hertfordshire constabulary told the Cambridge News that it had sent the following message to schools: “The challenge is believed to be spreading across Europe" and "Thames Valley Police have had three suicides recently that are believed linked to this." There is no evidence and no proof. To be fair however, they do say "However, the myth-busting website Snopes says that links between the Blue Whale game and teenage suicides in Russia remain unproven. It states: “It is more reasonable to assume that depressed or suicidal teenagers are simply drawn to the same social media groups, not that the groups were causing them to commit suicide.”

There has been mention made of the role of local police forces. David Wright, deputy headteacher at Woodlands School in the Essex town of Basildon wrote in his letter to parents " “We have discovered a game through the police that we think you should be aware of… It is called the Blue Whale game and is played via many social-media platforms." Now, I have asked Mr Wright for information on which social media platforms, because there's no evidence that I've yet found to substantiate that claim. Interestingly I contacted the media department of Essex Police and they told me that they have been 'made aware' of the dangers of the game. However, when pressed they absolutely refused to give me any more information. They would not say who had told them, or what - if any - evidence they had. I then asked why they were making such unsubstantiated claims, and they denied they were unsubstantiated, but they refused to actually substantiate them. Quite why any police force is going out and warning schools about something and then refusing to back up their claims is puzzling, at the very least!

The Blue Whale game itself

To start with, it's not a game. You can't buy it, download it or install it. It's not an app either. The idea is that you are contacted by, or request to be contacted by a 'curator' who provides a pre-set list of 50 tasks, to be completed once per day. The only place that I've been able to find a copy of the list is a picture of text written in Lithuanian. The two that are making most headlines are "11. Carve a whale on your hand with a razor and send it to the curator" and "50 Jump off a high building". Others include getting up at 4.20am (a reference to cannabis) and watching scary movies, listen to music that 'they' send you and 'talk to a whale'. So the idea that children can innocently start to play this game are entirely false, and the game reference isn't helpful at all. It gives entirely the wrong message to the general public, which leads to fear and suspicion. The 'blue whale' reference has been explained in a number of different ways, but the most obvious is that whales sometimes beach themselves in a deliberate act of suicide. One of the girls who jumped off a building also left a last image of a blue whale on her Instagram account, but once again, that's circumstantial at best as a link to any 'game'.

Brazil

It would appear that Brazil seems to have become the latest 'hotspot' for news items on Blue Whale. I've read several of the articles, and they are all very similar to those that have been written before, down to the same phrases, so I suspect that there's a lot of lazy cut and paste journalism going on. One news article reports on a 16 year old girl who drowned, but there's once again no proof that she was a victim of this 'game'. The deputy chief of police said "We will first check the existence of this game and if there was inducement, instigation or assistance to the suicide or if it was a deliberation of the victim itself.If there is a group of which she participated, we will trace the members that may have some relation with the event , Those responsible will be identified and will be criminally liable for the act. If they are adolescents, they will respond to the infraction" (Apologies for the English - this came from an auto translation by Google). In another reported suicide the article isn't clear on the reason why a child committed suicide "We have had two cases confirmed, and the case we investigated was initially discarded because there was no involvement with the game" according to a member of the Internet Crime Repression Office. In the past month, the Citizens’ Rights Regional Attorney has got Google toe to remove eleven videos that encouraged young people to self-mutilate or even commit suicide. However, the MPF, (Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público Federal)) however, has not yet opened an investigation against the game Blue Whale. 

Real or a hoax?

Snopes isn't exactly sitting on the fence here with it's 'unproven' claim. Because we're dealing with things that happen in Russia it's always going to be far more difficult to definitively prove that there isn't a causal link between a game that may or may not exist and the suicide of Russian children in a country that has a very high suicide rate. Snopes is always going to err on the side of caution, so it's not a surprising decision on their part. Snopes does say "There is certainly reason to be concerned about groups that venerate and promote suicide, but the creator of the “Sea of Whales” community (on the Russian social network) said that he had no interest in encouraging people to take their own lives. Rather, the group’s creator says that they created the game and the surrounding lore to drive traffic to the page". Any publicity that provides traffic to a group or site is usually seen as good publicity, so if you're wondering why anyone would make up a story about a 'game' of this nature, that's one obvious reason. 

The Net Family News website (tech intelligence for parents) is less cautious than Snopes. They say "It’s truly fake – a textbook example of how misinformation about online harm can itself be harmful." The Bulgarian Safer Internet Centre is also highly critical of the news stories. The point is also made by Georgi Apostolov of the Centre that there has only been one arrest (of Philipp Budeikin) and that was related to user communities, not a 'Blue Whale game'. An investigation by Radio Free Europe that found that no suicides had been definitively linked to these [“guru”-led] online communities. 

Russia’s long-running daily newspaper Izvestia ran an investigative piece on the Blue Whale game. It's in Russian, but if you use the Chrome browser, you can have it translated. Their journalists found that there were indeed thousands of hashtag references to the game, but that these had been created in the main by bots, NOT real human beings. The head of the Regional Public Center of Internet Technologies (ROCIT) Sergei Grebennikov, explained the prevalence of suicidal hashtags which were produced by people. They were created by three types of users; people who want to be in the trend of the game in the "blue whale" to try and see what tasks to perform. Second -  the creators of advertising campaigns who would try and get people to give children tasks such as clicking on a link or downloading an app - not in an effort to self harm, but to make money for the advertisers. The final group were people who are simply interested in the dissemination of information and wanted to see how many people were involved, what they were doing and so on - researching, essentially. Grebennikov also said that the media publicised about 15 cases of suicide which they claimed were as a result of games like "Blue whale", but none of them had been proved. 

I also spent some time looking at YouTube videos about the Blue Whale game. These were virtually all sensationalist with no useful information at all. Several of them included video of suicides taking place, but in every single one that I looked at it was easy to see that they had been faked. A child would be about to jump from a roof, the camera would move away, the sound of a scream would be heard, the camera would pan back to show no child, but also no jump either; very easy for a child to run back and scream at the same time. In another video viewers were informed that an image was available of the young woman who killed herself by jumping under a train, but the 'body' was clearly that of a dummy, the clothing and hair colour was different, the head was very neatly placed on the other side of the rail, there was no blood and so on. Amateur in the extreme. 

Scaremongering

One of the things that really concerns me is the amount of scaremongering that's taking place. Schools are frightening parents based on - as far as I can tell - sensationalist press coverage based on misinterpreted newspaper articles. Essex Police, while encouraging schools to frighten parents are not prepared to provide information on who they have got their information from, or even a single piece of evidence to show this is taking place. The use of the word 'game' is constantly being repeated and is confusing and unhelpful. Serious academic journals such as the TES are reporting incorrectly and in a sensationalist way. Yet this is nothing new. In 2007 'at least 16 young people' had committed suicide after visiting pro-suicide chat rooms. You can even go back to the 1980s with the great panic over the game Dungeons and Dragons with overblown claims that it resulted in Satanic worship, murder and suicide. What's dangerous is the panic, not what the panic is about. In 1990 there was a case in Rochdale in which around twenty children were removed from their homes by social services who alleged the existence of Satanic Ritual Abuse after discovering 'Satanic indicators'. No evidence was found of Satanic apparatus, and charges were dismissed when a court ruled the allegations were untrue. However by then it was too late and the damage was done.

What should you do?

Ask your school for evidence of the claims that they are making, go to the police and ask for instances where this game is being played. Ask the head teacher to be specific about which social networks are being used. Demand evidence and proof to back up these claims. Schools are responsible for the safety, both physical and mental of the children in their care. The more they simply send out knee-jerk scaremongering letters to parents which have no basis in fact, the less they will be trusted, and the one time when there IS a problem it may well be too late, since the school cried wolf once too often. 

The real concern that I have is that it's far too easy to use something like this 'game' to hide real fears and real concerns over the mental well being of children. Parents absolutely should talk to their children about how they are, what they're doing, if they're being bullied and so on, but this 'game' simply steers conversations off onto the wrong track. Talk about reality, get involved with their online lives, friend them on Facebook, share jokes on Instagram, collaborate with them on SnapChat and so on. Be part of their lives, and take real things seriously, and leave hoaxes and sensationalist press coverage where it belongs - in the gutter. Your children are worth more.