Families of two children in the United States have filed a lawsuit against the TikTok app over the so-called Blackout Challenge, allegedly responsible for the death of minors. According to an article by The Verge, five more children may also have been victims of the challenge.
The challenge became famous in 2021 and consists of encouraging participants to hold their breath until they pass out. In addition to the cases in the United States, a child in Italy also died.
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The families are being represented by the SMVLC (Social Media Victims Law Center), which specializes in social media, which believes the platform needs to be held accountable for the deaths.
“TikTok has invested billions of dollars to intentionally design products that push content that it knows is dangerous and results in the death of its users,” firm partner Matthew P. Bergman told The Guardian.
One of the victims was eight-year-old Lalani Erika Renee Walton, who lives in Texas. In the lawsuit, she says that she got a cell phone in 2021 and became addicted to watching videos on TikTok. “She also believed that if she posted a video of herself doing the blackout challenge, she would become famous on TikTok and so decided to give it a try,” the complaint reports.
In addition to liability, the lawsuit lists a number of grievances against TikTok, including its allowing underage users on the platform and failing to warn users and legal guardians of its addictive nature. In this sense, in the first quarter of 2022 alone, the Chinese platform has already deleted more than 20 million accounts of children under the age of 13.
In defense of one of the lawsuits, the platform spoke out saying that it has already blocked searches for the challenge and argued that the practice predates TikTok. Sought by the report, TikTok did not comment.
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