At least seven American children have died in tragic circumstances. US authorities investigate a dangerous challenge that has become popular on TikTok, the social app from the Chinese company ByteDance. TikTok was sued by relatives of some of the victims.
Is called Blackout Challenge. A challenge of ‘courage’, where the child must induce a state of suffocation and survive. There would be at least 7 – writes The Verge magazine – the children believed to have died trying to mimic the challenge on the social network. The oldest of them was 15 years old.
It is not an exclusively American phenomenon. In early 2021, a 10-year-old girl from Palermo lost her life in tragic circumstances, the first reconstructions attributed death to the “Blackout Challenge”. The incident had prompted the intervention of the Garant, who had requested and received a series of reassurances from the social network, in an effort to make it more difficult for children under 12 to register on social networks.
The social network’s algorithms, which are designed to push the most compelling content and make it go viral. Sometimes with dangerous results. It would not have been the children – claim their parents’ lawyers – to take on the challenge on TikTok independently. On the contrary, the accusation is that this was shown and promoted by TikTok on the main screen of the app.
In a statement, TikTok reiterated “to maintain a vigilant approach to ensuring the safety of its users” and to continue to “immediately remove all dangerous content” that violates the app’s policies. “We would like to express our sincere condolences to the families of the children for their tragic loss,” a ByteDance spokesperson added.
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Source: Lega Nerd
