TikTok is facing legal action from the parents of four British teenagers who say their children died after taking part in viral trends circulating on the social media platform.
Lisa Kenevan, Hollie Dance, Ellen Roome, and Liam Walsh are the parents of teenagers who allege that their children died of self-strangulation in 2022 after being targeted by the platform’s “recommendation products, programming decisions, and algorithmic discrimination”.
The lawsuit alleges that ByteDance, which owns TikTok, created “harmful dependencies” in each child as a “matter of design, then flooded them with a seemingly endless stream of harms.”
The claim, which has been filed in the US Superior Court of the State of Delaware by the Social Media Victims Law Center on behalf of the parents, says that the children had not searched for the viral trend, instead blaming TikTok for targeting them via its “unauthorised taking of personal data.”
The parents claim that their children had access to a variety of dangerous prank and challenge videos, including the ‘TikTok Blackout Challenge’, whereby the brain is starved of oxygen.
National Technology News has approached TikTok for comment.
Last year, a group of seven families took TikTok to court in Créteil, France, accusing the social media giant of exposing their children to content that led two of them to take their own lives.
According to Algos Victima, a collective launched to bring the families together, their children were exposed to numerous videos promoting suicide, self-mutilation, and eating disorders.
In November last year, Australia approved groundbreaking legislation banning children under 16 from using social media, setting a global benchmark for regulating digital platforms.
The Social Media Minimum Age bill, passed by the Senate with 34 votes to 19, forces tech giants including Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and X to prevent minors from accessing their platforms or face substantial fines of up to (AUS) $50 million.
