The parents of four British teenagers have sued TikTok over the deaths of their children, which they claim were the result of the viral “blackout challenge”.
The lawsuit claims Isaac Kenevan, 13, Archie Battersbee, 12, Julian “Jools” Sweeney, 14, and Maia Walsh, 13, died in 2022 while attempting the “blackout challenge”, which became popular on social media in 2021.
The US-based Social Media Victims Law Center filed the wrongful death lawsuit against the social media platform TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, on behalf of the children’s parents on Thursday.
Matthew Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, said: “It’s no coincidence that three of the four children who died from self-suffocation after being exposed to the dangerous and deadly TikTok blackout challenge lived in the same city and that they all fit a similar demographic.
“TikTok’s algorithm purposely targeted these children with dangerous content to increase their engagement time on the platform and drive revenue. It was a clear and deliberate business decision by TikTok that cost these four children their lives.”
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The lawsuit accuses TikTok of being “a dangerous and addictive product that markets itself as fun and safe for children, while lulling parents into a false sense of security”. It says TikTok “pushes dangerous prank and challenge videos to children based on their age and location in order to increase engagement time on the platform to generate higher revenues”.
The lawsuit further claims that TikTok has told lawmakers around the world that the blackout challenge had never been on its platform and “works to discount credible reports of children being exposed to and dying because of blackout and similar challenge videos on the platform”. It notes that other dangerous challenges that have been found on TikTok include those involving medications, hot water and fire.
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Jools’s mother has campaigned for parents to be given the legal right to access their children’s social media accounts to help understand why they died, after she was left with no clues as to her son’s death in 2022.
Changes to the Online Safety Act, which come into force in the UK this year, explicitly require social media companies to protect children from encountering dangerous stunts and challenges on their platforms, as well as to proactively prevent children from seeing the highest-risk forms of content.
For anybody like me who doesn’t know what the blackout challenge is:
The blackout challenge is a social media dare that calls on users to strangle themselves with a belt, purse strings, ropes, and similar items until they pass out, all while uploading the resulting videos to TikTok. However, the challenge did not start on TikTok, nor is it exclusive to the platform.
What the fuck
Thanks, although I was able to infer some of the significance from the name, I was confused about how kids were actually dying because something like this has been around for a long time. At least 30 years ago kids this age were making themselves blackout by holding their hands tightly against their necks. Even then, before the age of always on internet, most of the other kids rightly called those kids out as idiots. Adding mechanical devices is just next level evil? Next Level Stupid? I don’t know. I guess that’s what the lawsuit is trying to determine. I can guarantee that it will be used to further erode our privacy rights online as more and more kinds sites are forced to verify their users with government issued identification.
Yeah, it’s been going for decades but parents blame the website they let their kids sit on for hours instead of actually parenting and spending time with their kids. But at the end of the day, fuck trump
Where have kids been posting videos for decades?
If you think harmful memes didn’t spread before the internet, then you really have no understanding of human behavior.
The blackout challenge or variants have been around since at least the 1970s in the US.
I never said such a thing.
This is about broadcasting. Not word of mouth. If you can point to countless examples of broadcasting, please educate me.
Was it a hip thing to challenge people on public access tv? Was it in the letters to the editor in Highlights?
If you’re asking this and trying to argue this genuinely, then you’ve entirely lost the plot.
‘broadcasting’ doesn’t enter into this. Kids will do this regardless, and have done this regardless for much longer than the UK has had access to any type of video media.
The only difference is kids can now show their stupidity to the world… Which they have been able to do for the last 40 years to some extent. We don’t call a personal website broadcasting, because by no written definition could it be considered that. Neither is YouTube broadcast media, nor any internet thing (strictly speaking).
Neither is Tiktok, nor will be what comes after it, and so on.
Now we could change the definition of broadcast to mean any internet site or app and apply broadcast standards to it… but that just means the UK loses access to the Internet. No one would comply, because what power does a tiny island in perpetual economic decline have? If UK didn’t have any domestic advertisers sites would already ignore it.
