Last Friday, a lawsuit was filed against TikTok in Los Angeles County Superior Court accusing the service and its parent company of negligence and distributing a substandard product. He allegedly promotes dangerous trends and did not offer children and parents adequate safety features, which led to the death of two girls. Social Media Victims Law Center provides legal assistance to affected families.
The stories of 8-year-old Lalani Erika Walton (Texas) and 9-year-old Arriani Jailin Arroyo (Milwaukee) are very similar. Both girls wanted to become “popular on TikTok” by posting videos of their dancing and singing on the platform. At some point, TikTok’s algorithms began offering videos from the Blackout Challenge to girls, according to the lawsuit. This is a kind of challenge, the participants of which record a video with self-suffocation, up to loss of consciousness, and invite the audience to repeat this action.
In July 2021, Lalani started seeing videos from the Blackout Challenge. In the middle of this month, bruises appeared on her neck, but she explained to her parents that they were the result of a fall. Soon after, Lalani and her stepmother spent a long time in the car, and after returning home, the stepmother dozed off. When she woke up and went to Lalani’s bedroom, she found the girl “hanging on the bed with a rope around her neck.” Police, after examining Lalani’s phone and tablet, said the girl was watching the Blackout Challenge video “on repeat.”
Lalani “was convinced that if she published a video of herself participating in the Blackout Challenge, she would become famous,” the lawsuit says. But the young girl “didn’t appreciate or understand the dangerous nature of what TikTok encouraged her to do.”
Arriani also enjoyed posting song and dance videos on TikTok and “gradually became obsessed” with the app. On February 26, 2021, Arriani’s father worked in the basement while the children played in her room. At some time, the younger brother Edwardo went down to the basement to his father and said that Arriani was not moving. He rushed upstairs to check on the girl, he found that his daughter was “hanging on the leash of the family dog.” Arriani was rushed to the hospital and put on a ventilator, but it was too late. By that time, the girl’s brain had ceased to function, and in the end she was taken off life support.
Lalani and Arriani are not the first children to die during an attempt to repeat the Blackout Challenge. Nyla Anderson, 10, accidentally hanged herself in her family’s home in an attempt to emulate the trend. A number of other children between the ages of 10 and 14 have reportedly died under similar circumstances while attempting the Blackout Challenge.
While social media platforms have long been accused of posting socially harmful content, a federal law called Section 230 makes it difficult to file a lawsuit against the platforms themselves. Under Section 230, apps and websites are free to host user-generated content and moderate it as they see fit without worrying about being sued. But in this lawsuit, the lawyers are trying to circumvent Section 230 by presenting the death due to the Blackout Challenge as a flaw in product architecture, not content moderation. TikTok has been accused of developing an algorithmically curated social media product that has sent Lalani and Arriani into a dangerous trend. As the complaint states: Plaintiffs “argue that TikTok is not responsible for what third parties said or did, but for what TikTok did or did not do.”
Source: latimes
