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  • 2017-02-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Is the 'Blue Whale' Game Responsible for Dozens of Suicides in Russia? (en)
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  • In February 2017, English-language web sites caught wind of a purported suicide game that had reportedly resulted in more than a hundred deaths in Russia. The general premise of the game, which goes by several names but is commonly referred to as the blue whale game, is as follows: The claim that the blue whale suicide game (named after the way whales sometimes beach themselves and then die) had resulted in a wave of suicides appears to have originated with a misinterpretation of a May 2016 story from the Russian site Novaya Gazeta. That article 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: Furthermore, the Novaya Gazeta report was highly criticized at the time of its publication. For instance, the web site Meduza noted that Noyaya Gazeta arrived at their conclusion that a social media game was causing teenagers to commit suicide because several teenagers from the same social media group had taken their own lives. However, Meduza argued, 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: Although Blue Whale suicide groups have not been directly linked to hundreds of suicides in Russia, the groups do apparently exist. They originated shortly after the death of Rina Palenkova, a Russian teenager who supposedly took her own life shortly after posting a photograph of herself on VK.com. The image was widely circulated on social media, and Rina soon became the central figure of a strange cult-like group: There is certainly reason to be concerned about groups that venerate and promote suicide, but the creator of the Sea of Whales community 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: Russia has a high baseline suicide rate among young people. In 2013, for instance, 461 minors took their own lives. In May 2017, stories appeared in English-language media about the alleged creator of the game, who according to media reports remains detained in Russia. Phillip Budeikin, 21, had apparently confessed to inciting young girls to commit suicide months before (calling them biological waste, according to some reports) but we were only able to trace these claims back to a November 2016 story on one site, saint-petersburg.ru (translated): This story was inexplicably picked up months later by international tabloids (alongside claims that the game was spreading across the world), but we remain unable to verify any of the claims. (en)
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