A mother from the US state of Pennsylvania is suing social media website TikTok after her 10-year-old daughter died after attempting the ‘blackout challenge’ which she saw on the app.
She filed that lawsuit in the US district court for the eastern district of Pennsylvania.
The mother, Tawainna Anderson, found her daughter Nylah unconscious last December after she attempted the challenge.
The challenge asks people to choke themselves until they pass out. Nylah died after spending five days in the hospital.
The lawsuit filed last week alleges that TikTok did not stop its spread despite the videos of people performing the challenge going viral.
China-owned TikTok was quick to jump to its own defense and said that the challenge predated the app.
However, this is misleading since a child from India’s Rajasthan also died after following this trend in 2019, a year before the app was banned and another child from the US state of Colorado also died while attempting this trend.
Robert J Mongeluzzi, Tawainna Anderson’s lawyer, said that the algorithm of Tiktok sent a video which showed ‘essentially a how to asphyxiate yourself video, disguised as a challenge, to a 10-year-old’, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. “It is inexcusable,” Mongeluzzi was quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal. He also highlighted that Nylah did not learn the challenge from any other social platform but TikTok.
The lawsuit also alleges that the social media app’s algorithm determined that the “blackout challenge” was “well-tailored and likely to be of interest to 10-year-old Nylah Anderson, and she died as a result.”
The lawsuit seeks an undisclosed amount of monetary damages from TikTok.
An investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2021 revealed that TikTok’s algorithms can drive minors to videos about sex, drugs and eating disorders.
The Wall Street Journal in 2021 conducted an investigation where it was revealed that TikTok figures people’s desires and emotions and shows them content based on user behavior. The Wall Street Journal created bot accounts to find that the algorithm detects that a certain kind of content is useful to create engagement and pushes that kind of content to user’s phones.
Guillaume Chaslot, founder of Algotransparency, while speaking to the WSJ said that the algorithm pushes people towards more extreme content so it can push the user towards more and more watch time.
TikTok’s secretive algorithm is protected by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd and the company now boasts more than one billion monthly users and it was also the most visited site globally in 2021.
(with inputs from the Wall Street Journal)
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