Blue Whale: Medical institutions told to keep tabs on students

FARIDKOT: Owing to technical limitations in blocking the Blue Whale game, the Department of Medical Education and Research today issued an advisory to the heads of all medical, dental, nursing, homeopathy, ayurveda, pharmacy and physiotherapy colleges in the state, asking them to distribute the copies of the advisory among students and teachers.

Blue Whale is introduced with a new hash tag every time to every user.

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, September 22

Owing to technical limitations in blocking the Blue Whale game, the Department of Medical Education and Research today issued an advisory to the heads of all medical, dental, nursing, homeopathy, ayurveda, pharmacy and physiotherapy colleges in the state, asking them to distribute the copies of the advisory among students and teachers.

“Such a horrendous menace in which the final challenge to the participant requires him/her to commit suicide can be tackled only when we, individually and jointly, take it head on,” said Vikas Pratap, Secretary, Medical Education and Research, Punjab.

“Luring the youth in their formative years, games like Blue Whale exploit them,” read the note. The teachers and students should monitor the potential victims closely and in particular look out for depressed and violent behaviour, long lonely hours online and late night surfing.

“Though the government has asked tech giants like Google, and social media players like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others to delete all Blue Whale links from their platform, this game is introduced with a new hash tag every time to every user. Hence, the tech giants are also finding it tough to block the contents related to this game as they do not exercise full control over the content hosted by the designers of this game,” read the advisory note.

As Blue Whale is not an app available for download and also there is no website, it is not possible to block at the level of Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, Bengaluru. This is a game that happens on the basis of a one-on-one interaction between the curator (game developers) and the player. The curator and the player use certain “code” hash tags to find each other. Even if these hash tags are blocked, the curators can create and develop new hash tags, hence it is not possible to block such tags.