Parents filed a lawsuit against TikTok over the deaths of four British children, which they claim was caused by the viral "blackout challenge."
The lawsuit argues that the victims, 12-year-old Archie Battersbee, 13-year-old Isaac Kenevan, 13-year-old Maia Walsh, and 14-year-old Julian "Jools" Sweeney, all died in 2022 while attempting to complete the viral challenge, which became a hit on the platform in 2021. The blackout challenge is an internet challenge based around the choking game, which deprives the brain of oxygen.
Parents File a Lawsuit Against TikTok
The U.S.-based Social Media Victims Law Center was the one that filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the social media platform. It was against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, and was filed on behalf of the parents of the deceased kids on Thursday.
The founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, Matthew Bergman, said that it was no coincidence that three of the four deceased kids who died from self-suffocation after being exposed to the viral "blackout challenge" all came from the same city and fit a similar demographic, according to The Guardian.
Bergman added that TikTok's algorithm purposely targets these children using "dangerous content" to increase their engagement on the platform and the company's revenue. He noted that this was a clear and deliberate business decision that cost four young kids their lives.
On the other hand, TikTok has blocked searches for videos or hashtags related to the "blackout challenge" since 2020. The company added that it also prohibits dangerous content or challenges on its platform and aims to remove them before users report them.
Could the Children's Deaths Have Been Prevented?
The lawsuit claims that the children's deaths were "the foreseeable result of ByteDance's engineered addiction-by-design and programming decisions." It added that these pushed children to maximize their engagement with the platform by any means necessary, BBC reported.
The lawsuit also accuses the parent company of having "created harmful dependencies in each child" through its platform's design and "flooded them with a seemingly endless stream of harms." It argues that these were not what children searched for or even wanted to see when they started using TikTok.
The lawsuit is believed to be the first time that British families are suing TikTok through the U.S. courts over the death of a child. Many social media platforms, including Meta and Snapchat, have faced hundreds of legal claims by U.S. families and schools over the years. These allege that the companies' products are defective and cause harm to children.
In January 2025, TikTok narrowly avoided being blocked in the U.S. after President Donald Trump granted the company a reprieve on a law that would have made it illegal for the app to appear on U.S. smartphone stores, as per Telegraph.
