British schools have warned parents to watch out for a sinister social media game believed to be responsible for nearly 130 teen deaths in Russia.
The so-called ‘suicide game’ – Blue Whale – requires participants to follow a set of 50 instructions doled out by an anonymous master, and some of the challenges are proving to be fatal.
Following the deaths of countless young people in Russia, authorities began to investigate Blue Whale for actively encouraging suicide – and now the game could be coming to the UK.
The headteacher of Woodlands School in Basildon has warned parents about the dangerous game.
In the letter, as seen by Essex Live, David Wright wrote:
We have discovered a game through the police that we feel you should be aware of.
As you already know from my previous letters, we have a duty of care for our pupils and are striving to do all we can to ensure that you are given the latest information to help safeguard our young people.
Explaining the threat, Wright continued:
It is called The Blue Whale Game and is played via many social media platforms. Players are given a master who controls them for 50 days and each day they are given a task to complete.
On the 50th day the masters behind the game instruct the young people to commit suicide and sadly across the world some have done this.
Yulia Konstantinova, 15, and Veronika Volkova, 16, reportedly committed suicide in an apartment block in Ust-Ilimsk, in the Irkutsk region of Russia.
Yulia (pictured below) left a note reading ‘End’ on her social page after posting a picture of a blue whale. The animal’s image is seen as a symbol of the social media movement.
It allegedly encourages children to take their own lives, planting the seed of suicidal thoughts into the minds of young people with pictures of an approaching train captioned, ‘This world is not for us’ and photographs of teens on a roof, claiming ‘We are children of the dead generation’.
They are also urged to watch horror movies all day, and to wake themselves at 4.20 am. The steps lead up to demands for participants to take their own lives on the 50th day, thus ‘winning’ the depraved game.
Yulia’s friend Veronika (pictured below) wrote, ‘Sense is lost… End’. She regularly posted messages with heart-breaking sentiments, such as, ‘Do you feel that gradually you become useless?’ or ‘I’m just a ghost’.
The girls’ tragic deaths are indicative of a string of teen suicides believe to be linked to Blue Whale.
In response the Russian Investigative Committee opened a probe on ‘incitement to suicide’ regarding Yulia and Veronika’s deaths, paying ‘particular attention’ to ‘their social contacts on the Internet’.
If any of the issues above have affected you, please don’t suffer in silence. You can call Samaritans anonymously on their 24 hour hotline free of charge on 116 123.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.