Explained: What is TikTok’s deadly ‘blackout challenge’, blamed for the deaths of several young children?

What is TikTok’s ‘Blackout challenge’?

It is a challenge in which people are encouraged to choke themselves until they become unconscious due to the lack of oxygen.

It is unclear who started the viral trend. But a report in The New York Times quoted Know Your Meme, a website that details popular memes, as saying the challenge received widespread media attention after three young children died in Italy in January 2021 while attempting the blackout challenge.

TikTok, which was at one time popular in India, has been banned in the country along with dozens of other apps with links to China since 2020.

The recent lawsuit against TikTok’s ‘blackout challenge’

The families of 8-year-old Lalani of Temple, Texas, and 9-year-old Arriani of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in partnership with Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), which works to hold social media companies legally accountable for the harm they inflict on vulnerable users, filed the lawsuit on June 30 in a California court.

The wrongful death lawsuit against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance says the children “died of self-strangulation while participating in TikTok’s ‘Blackout Challenge’, which encourages users to choke themselves with belts, purse strings or other similar items until passing out”.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, lists a number of complaints, including that the app’s algorithm promotes harmful content, allows underage users, and fails to warn users or their guardians of TikTok’s addictive nature, The Guardian reported.

The New York Times report said the lawsuit referred to TikTok’s “For You” page, which allegedly features a personalised stream of videos curated by the algorithm based on the user’s demographics, ‘likes’, and prior activity.

Matthew P Bergman of SMVLC has been quoted as saying TikTok has invested billions to intentionally develop an app to push content that it knows is harmful. “TikTok needs to be held accountable for pushing deadly content to these two young girls,” Bergman said in a statement.

“TikTok”, according to SMVLC lawyers, “prioritised greater corporate profits over the health and safety of its users and, specifically, over the health and safety of vulnerable children TikTok knew or should have known were actively using its social media product”.

TikTok’s response

The Sacramento Bee quoted a TikTok spokesperson as expressing the company’s “deepest sympathies” for the families’ “tragic loss”. However, the spokesperson pointed out, the challenge predates TikTok.

“This disturbing ‘challenge’, which people seem to learn about from sources other than TikTok, long predates our platform and has never been a TikTok trend,” the spokesperson told McClatchy News, The Bee report said. “We remain vigilant in our commitment to user safety and would immediately remove related content if found.”

This statement is similar to the one TikTok issued in response to the lawsuit in the Nylah Anderson case. In the earlier statement, given to The Washington Post among other publications, the TikTok spokesperson also linked to a 2008 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study that found at least 82 children had died after playing “the choking game” between 1995 and 2007, long before the app that ultimately became TikTok was launched in China.

Dangerous Internet games

Zach Sweat, managing editor of Know Your Meme, told The New York Times that he did not know if dangerous challenges on the Internet now are “any more dangerous” than they have been earlier. “I think the accessibility of these types of things and the way these algorithms work broadcasts it to more people,” he said.

Over the years, several potentially dangerous challenges have spread across the Internet, like the ‘Tide Pod Challenge’ in which people eat small packets of laundry detergent on camera, leading to dozens of cases of poisoning, and the ‘Fire Challenge’, in which people share videos of applying flammable liquid to the skin and setting it on fire.