Parents sue TikTok, saying children died after viewing ‘blackout challenge’

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/tiktok-blackout-challenge-deaths.html

by jbegley • 4 years ago

29 41 4 years ago

nytimes.com

metadat• 4 years ago

The parents should sue themselves. Go after the negligent enablers charged with the safety of their kids.

bergenty2• 4 years ago

Parents should surveil their kids 24/7?

lillecarl2• 4 years ago

Depends on age. Either way it's the parents job to keep their kids safe until they're $legal_age. Sometimes this might mean teaching common sense, sometimes it might mean not exposing your kids to TikTok.

It feels like common sense is a dying thing, could it be because we specialize further and further? I "can't cook" for example.

jmprspret2• 4 years ago

Watching over your kids is 'surveillance' now? Look, I get not invading the privacy of your 14 year old, but monitoring or restricting what children can see online at 8-9 sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Children shouldn't have unrestricted internet access until at least 13 years old.

rvz• 4 years ago

The girls were 8 and 9 when they died last year after viewing the challenge, which encouraged users to choke themselves until they passed out, according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday in Superior Court in Los Angeles County.

How were they able to get on to the platform in the first place?

So TikTok allows 8 to 9 year olds to sign up on there and they don't check / verify their ages? If YouTube is able to do KYC age checks, why can't TikTok?

willcipriano• 4 years ago

Bill Clinton signed COPA into law in 98, it requires companies that distribute harmful online content ensure that they aren't doing so to children, but the ACLU sued so it never took effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act

salawat• 4 years ago

Age checks have always been an honor system sort of thing, and lets be real:

Lesson number 1 of internet access: don't share your personal info with anyone. They don't have the right to it, and you don't know what they'll really do with it.

Regardless of a majority of people completely missing the bus on this valuable lesson, it also negates the usefulness of such measures.

theandrewbailey• 4 years ago

Indeed:

Lalani Erika Walton ... got her first cellphone on her 8th birthday
Arriani Jaileen Arroyo ... received a phone when she was 7

Justin_K• 4 years ago

Parenting is not as easy as you think and can be severely difficult for disadvantaged populations. While it is easy to blame parents, you can't always blame the parents.

cush2• 4 years ago

TikTok has been the #1 app on the app store for years and is serving instructional videos of children committing acts of self-harm. Distributing content like that warrants some liability.

Claude_Shannon• 4 years ago

As always in there cases I have question to ask - where were the parents? Why they let their children use TikTok unsupervised that young?

pawsforthought• 4 years ago

Never mind just TikTok, why did the children have access to smartphones at all?

But then, I think that’s where you’ll find your answer. This technology pacifies, or at the very least occupies.

prirun• 4 years ago

IMO, young kids need a phone that only has family numbers on it for texting or phone calls. No internet.

tzs• 4 years ago

Never mind just TikTok, why did the children have access to smartphones at all?

Perhaps because public telephones have largely disappeared?

I remember when I was a kid, before cell phones, and our parents let us do things on our own we'd make sure we had some change so that if something went wrong we could just find a payphone and call home for help. Same if we had a change of plans and needed to let our parents know we were going to be late.

Etherlord87• 4 years ago

I don't have kids, my nephew is watching tiktok, though. I think it's unrealistic to think you can supervise a child completely, but probably there should be an easy interface to see what your children were watching - then you can at least teach your children that some of these things are dangerous. For example, my nephew showed me a prank with a flour poured into a hairdrier - to which I commented that it's dangerous because a flour is highly flammable, and the construction of the hairdrier makes for a very good igniter (very high temperature wires + blowing the flour with air, dispersing it and increasing the surface area of contact with air).

NoPicklez2• 4 years ago

Is TikTok the problem though? Kids can Google whatever they want and find harmful things.

This challenge was a thing in middle school back in 2006 but we didn't have phones then.

thebruce87m• 4 years ago

Try as you might, you can’t keep your eyes on them the whole time.

frognumber2• 4 years ago

I'll be contrarian. These lawsuits are a Good Thing. Market forces push web sites and apps which are more addictive, more hateful, and more polarizing. Unless we have some mechanism to get that under control, things will continue to spiral.

I don't want to work on harmful technologies, and without government intervention, there will be increasingly incentives to do things which are harmful. Market forces apply to everyone -- devs, executives, researchers, and otherwise. A regulatory climate is there to point those forces to good.

Ideally, regulatory regimes don't ban things but, for example, tax or provide grants. I don't support outright bans. However, I would like to live with an internet which is, by default, safe for me and safe for my children. I support public funding of free software, laws like the GDPR, taxes on harmful things like sugar, and subsidies on healthy things. I'd like to live in a nice world.

The way I'd like the world to look is that the default path is what's considered nice and healthy, but the non-default path is available to people who have other opinions.

vannevar• 4 years ago

I think the problem here is a mismatch between the idea of a common carrier, where distribution is content- and audience-neutral, and social media sites which actively analyze both content and audience and distribute the content accordingly. In the latter case, there is no public interest served by limiting liability, and such sites should absolutely be liable for content that they actively present to users.

cush2• 4 years ago

Absolutely agree. I'm not sure why a governing body like the FCC isn't getting involved. TikTok is serving instructional videos of children committing acts of self-harm. If this was done on TV, it would be a multi-million dollar class action. Television has strict rules around content served to children. The UK is cracking down on this kind of thing, and I hope it spills into the US.

Where is the liability?

frognumber2• 4 years ago

Absolutely agreed.

FastMonkey• 4 years ago

I never thought of it like that before. I absolutely agree!

iroh2727• 4 years ago

Well, I guess they won the challenge at least...

In all seriousness though, screw TikTok. Kids should not be using (un)social media til like age 16 at least. I always wonder how the future will view the creators of these (un)social media apps. Brilliant innovators? Capitalists that turned a blind eye? Soulless murderers?

hgazx• 4 years ago

I was under the impression that it was impossible to kill yourself in such a manner. I thought that you’d pass out and immediately start breathing again.

CodesInChaos• 4 years ago

I believe an air-choke can deplete the oxygen in your blood so much that you don't always resume breathing.

archon1410• 4 years ago

On July 15, 2021, Lalani was found with a rope around her neck, the suit says.

I think most if not all of these cases would involve something other than use of one's hand/breathing control to choke, which of course is quite deadly.

NoPicklez2• 4 years ago

I don't see how this is overly TikTok's fault. Kids can go online and Google almost anything they like and find things much more disturbing. But is Google responsible for that?

This challenge was something we did back in middle school in 2006, we didn't have mobile phones at all in school back them.

unmole• 4 years ago

She got her first cellphone on her 8th birthday on April 23, 2021, and quickly became “addicted” to TikTok, where she posted videos of herself singing and dancing in hopes of becoming “TikTok famous,” the suit says.

So, what were the parents doing while the child got addicted?

Parents sue TikTok, saying children died after viewing ‘blackout challenge’

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