The Blue Whale Game (Russian: Синий кит, Siniy kit) is a controversial Internet "game" with influence in several countries that consists of a series of tasks assigned to players by administrators during a 50-day period, with the final challenge requiring the player to commit suicide.[1][2] The term "Blue Whale" comes from the phenomenon of beached whales, which is likened to suicide.
Blue Whale began in Russia in 2013 with "F57", one of the names of the so-called "death group" of the VKontakte social network,[3] and caused its first believed case of suicide in 2015.[4][5] Philipp Budeikin, a former psychology student who was expelled from his university, claimed that he invented the game. Budeikin stated that his purpose was to "clean" the society by pushing to suicide those he deemed as having no value.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
In Russia in 2016, Blue Whale came into broader use among teenagers after a journalist brought attention to it through an article that linked many unrelated suicide victims to the Blue Whale, creating a wave of moral panic in Russia.[13] Later, russian Blue Whale administrator Philipp Budeikin was arrested and plead guilty to "inciting at least 16 teenage girls to commit suicide," leading to Russian suicide prevention legislation and renewed world-wide concern over the Blue Whale phenomenon.[14] This sometimes led to false alarms and imitators, like in Italy, or hoaxes concerning the spread of its use to new countries, such as in Bulgaria. But it has also been linked to other rising self-harm trends, such as "human embroidery" in China.[15] As such, it continues to be of concern to many goverments and media outlets