been thinking about how so much of the coverage of the slenderman stabbing took the idea that no adolescent girls had ever done such a thing before for granted, which is wild because that's definitely not the case. just off the top of my head the Parker–Hulme murder in Christchurch, NZ has a lot in common with the slenderman stabbing: girls deeply bonded by shared delusions, an increasingly inability to differentiate fact from fiction, a shocking act of violence committed because of a desperate belief in an outcome that any outsider could see was insane. this wasn't obscure: juliet hulme grew up to be a popular mystery author using the pen name ann perry, and the resulting scandal when her identity was revealed overlapped with a movie directed by peter jackson and launched melanie lynskey and kate winselt to stardom. all of this was big news in the 1990s and continues to have a cultural legacy, albeit a more niche one these days.
but the murder in Christchurch happened in the 1950s, and the internet did not exist in the 1950s. children have been exchanging scary stories since most anyone can remember, and the telling of urban legends have always been a big part of american youth culture. hell, we had these books about aliens and ghosts that presented their subject matter as real that scared the shit out of me as a kid and led to a phobia of aliens that lasted well into my adulthood and long after i had the capacity to understand it was horseshit. i'm hardly the only one to have an experience like this, and the majority of us are fine and not at all traumatized because we read some spooky stories in the third grade. obviously, parents should be paying attention to how their children spend their time and what they're consuming both in real life and online, but it should have been obvious a lot more was going on here than "child has unsupervised access to scary stories the internet."
i still see this shit play out to a lesser degree, usually in the form of the exhausted parents of young children panicking about some five nights at freddy's knockoff or reading too much into shit like the spiderman-elsa videos. there are dangers here, but it's not satanists trying to recruit your kid or predators trying to communicate through cartoon youtube videos: it's companies trying to take advantage of kid's mushy brains to keep them watching and selling them shit. it's unscrupulous influence taking advantage of their audience's naiveté for easy cash and fame. and it's an entire online ecosystem dedicated to preying on your fears as a parent, getting you to click and share without thinking things through because their content is designed to exploit your legitimate fears and natural protective instincts. this isn't new either: much of the slenderman stabbing coverage came from traditional media where people knew damn well what they were doing because they'd pulled all the same tricks during other moral panics for decades.
but the internet has made it possible for any mercenary creep with enough technical knowledge and ambition to make a lot of money exploiting people's fears by telling blatant lies. obviously, children are easy targets, but there are actual laws providing some protections for that demographic, and more cautious grifters choose to go after vulnerable adults like the parents of small children. this is all just one aspect of a much larger problem, but it's always worth considering who is trying to sell our fears back to us and what they have to gain from it, and it's been on my mind a lot lately
