TikTok sued by grieving parents who claim their children died when attempting dangerous ‘blackout challenge’

This past Thursday, the Social Media Victims Law Center filed a wrongful death lawsuit against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, on behalf of British parents Lisa Kenevan, Ellen Roome, and Liam Walsh. All three parents allege that their children passed away as a direct result of the TikTok-circulated “blackout challenge.”

Per the BBC, the lawsuit has resulted from a complaint filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware, alleging that the deaths of the children — Isaac Kenevan (13), Julian “Jools” Sweeney (14), and Maia Walsh (13) — were “the foreseeable result of ByteDance’s engineered addiction-by-design and programming decisions.”

The blackout challenge is derived from the choking game, wherein participants choke themselves so as to cut off oxygen from the brain in hopes of attaining a temporary loss of consciousness and a perceived, accompanying state of euphoria. As of late 2022, the blackout challenge has been linked to the deaths of 20 children, while the choking game as a whole has been linked to as many as 82 deaths between 1995 and 2007, per a 2008 CDC report.

The lawsuit filed on behalf of Keneyan, Roome, and Walsh is just the latest of many lawsuits leveled against TikTok for its role in exposing children to the challenge. The first of these — filed in May 2022 by Tawainna Anderson, whose 10-year-old daughter Nyla allegedly passed away from taking part in the blackout challenge — was dismissed on the assertion that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act rendered TikTok immune from any liability.

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

The dismissal was reversed in August 2024 by the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act could not protect TikTok on account of the app’s algorithms recommending the blackout challenge to users.

A fourth parent — Hollie Dance, whose 12-year-old son Archie Battersbee was found unconscious in his family home on April 7 last year before passing away at the NHS hospital four months later — was also named in yesterday’s lawsuit, although she later claimed during a pre-inquest hearing that she didn’t know if Archie had been trying the blackout challenge prior to his death. The hearing also revealed that police had found messages pertaining to self-harm and suicide sent by Archie to a WhatsApp group.

Patterns of adolescent online behavior involving self-harm and suicide have consistently been informed by a lack of clarity afforded to parents. The Momo and Blue Whale challenges of the mid-to-late aughts (which were alleged to encourage children to commit suicide) were ultimately revealed as internet hoaxes that gained most of their prominence from unsubstantiated moral panic between uninformed parents.

Perhaps knowing this, Ellen Roome, one of the aforementioned parents, hopes to pass “Jools’ Law” in honor of her deceased son. This would grant parents access to the accounts and data of their children’s social media if they pass away.

Hoax or not, the fact of the cultural existence of these challenges can’t be taken lightly. Beyond the deaths and bodily harm that these challenges can (and do) pose to impressionable youth, the mere presence and prominence of these challenges on social media platforms fosters a rather disturbing culture of sensational detachment. It is all but imperative that a massive cultural shift — one that combats the impulse of distraction that social media wants us to bite on, and that consciously respects our uncomfortable emotions and need for true connection — is embraced to counteract such a thing.