Parents sue TikTok, saying children died after viewing ‘blackout challenge’ | Hacker News Reader

Parents sue TikTok, saying children died after viewing ‘blackout challenge’

nytimes.com

29 pointsjbegley43 comments

I'll be contrarian. These lawsuits are a Good Thing. Market forces push web sites and apps which are more addictive, more hateful, and more polarizing. Unless we have some mechanism to get that under control, things will continue to spiral.

I don't want to work on harmful technologies, and without government intervention, there will be increasingly incentives to do things which are harmful. Market forces apply to everyone -- devs, executives, researchers, and otherwise. A regulatory climate is there to point those forces to good.

Ideally, regulatory regimes don't ban things but, for example, tax or provide grants. I don't support outright bans. However, I would like to live with an internet which is, by default, safe for me and safe for my children. I support public funding of free software, laws like the GDPR, taxes on harmful things like sugar, and subsidies on healthy things. I'd like to live in a nice world.

The way I'd like the world to look is that the default path is what's considered nice and healthy, but the non-default path is available to people who have other opinions.

I think the problem here is a mismatch between the idea of a common carrier, where distribution is content- and audience-neutral, and social media sites which actively analyze both content and audience and distribute the content accordingly. In the latter case, there is no public interest served by limiting liability, and such sites should absolutely be liable for content that they actively present to users.

Absolutely agree. I'm not sure why a governing body like the FCC isn't getting involved. TikTok is serving instructional videos of children committing acts of self-harm. If this was done on TV, it would be a multi-million dollar class action. Television has strict rules around content served to children. The UK is cracking down on this kind of thing, and I hope it spills into the US.

Where is the liability?

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/1150022...

Absolutely agreed.

I never thought of it like that before. I absolutely agree!

I don't see how this is overly TikTok's fault. Kids can go online and Google almost anything they like and find things much more disturbing. But is Google responsible for that?

This challenge was something we did back in middle school in 2006, we didn't have mobile phones at all in school back them.

I was under the impression that it was impossible to kill yourself in such a manner. I thought that you’d pass out and immediately start breathing again.

I believe an air-choke can deplete the oxygen in your blood so much that you don't always resume breathing.

> On July 15, 2021, Lalani was found with a rope around her neck, the suit says.

I think most if not all of these cases would involve something other than use of one's hand/breathing control to choke, which of course is quite deadly.

> She got her first cellphone on her 8th birthday on April 23, 2021, and quickly became “addicted” to TikTok, where she posted videos of herself singing and dancing in hopes of becoming “TikTok famous,” the suit says.

So, what were the parents doing while the child got addicted?

Well, I guess they won the challenge at least...

In all seriousness though, screw TikTok. Kids should not be using (un)social media til like age 16 at least. I always wonder how the future will view the creators of these (un)social media apps. Brilliant innovators? Capitalists that turned a blind eye? Soulless murderers?

The parents should sue themselves. Go after the negligent enablers charged with the safety of their kids.

Parents should surveil their kids 24/7?

Depends on age. Either way it's the parents job to keep their kids safe until they're $legal_age. Sometimes this might mean teaching common sense, sometimes it might mean not exposing your kids to TikTok.

It feels like common sense is a dying thing, could it be because we specialize further and further? I "can't cook" for example.

> Either way it's the parents job to keep their kids safe until they're $legal_age.

If someone sells alcohol to a minor they can be sued and will likely be in trouble if the child is harmed. It is the seller's responsibility to make sure they don't and it wouldn't enough to have a sign saying "please don't buy if you are a minor". They must actively check. Same thing with firearms. Even the (adult) entertainment industry works like that.

Here too tiktok "sold" a product to some kids, and these kids were harmed. Consequently they have some responsibility over that. Why should the IT industry get away with practice that would not be accepted in any other industry?

The role of parents is not to keep their kids safe at all costs. If it were then just keeping children locked up until their majority would be optimal parenting. Instead we as a society should thrive to make the world safe for those kids rather than just pretend it's the exclusive responsibility of their parents.

how can they do? everyone give their kid cellphone or iPad now, even they try to control this in early stages, if kids are different to other kids in school, they will bad and try to change themselves. finally, if someone upload videos that design to murder kids, it just will happen.

How do you propose they check? Active Facial recognition?

Parents login to devices and give them to their kids, the vast majority do not setup child profiles or enable restrictions.

This is school age. You have to assume that at that point someone they talk to will have access to anything on the internet or will pass any information they want. All the common sense and supervision will not save you from kids interacting, unless you plan to never let them out of the house.

Parents are not the ones exposing their children to Tiktok. Most kids go to public school. Hopefully further elaboration is not needed for HackerNews readership.

"Teaching common sense" sounds very effective for young children with developing minds notorious for making terrible decisions. If only those parents had thought of it sooner.

I don't see any argument here, kids go to public Schools and get shown TikTok. But it's not like TikTok hasn't made headlines for some time now. An engaged parent might talk to their kids about not doing the stupid things they find on TikTok.

I'm not saying TikTok is right in promoting harmful things, it's like the town square lunatic on steroids, but at the end of the day kids are going to be exposed to stupid shit through all their life (as you say) so if it's not TikTok it's something else, teach your kids not to choke themselves to death intentionally.

Calling TikTok the town square lunatic is not an apt analogy. The town square lunatic is isolated, can’t reach a lot of people and doesn’t have peoples attention for very long. There are legions of crazies online that have banded together to really push terrible propaganda that very few adults, let alone kids would be able to resist.

Watching over your kids is 'surveillance' now? Look, I get not invading the privacy of your 14 year old, but monitoring or restricting what children can see online at 8-9 sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Children shouldn't have unrestricted internet access until at least 13 years old.

13 seems like an arbitrary number. Why not 16? Or 12? 18, 21?

Because it’s entirely common to use articulate cutoffs. It’s considered a felony to have sex with a 17 year old boy on his eve preceding his birthday but it’s A-ok the next morning.

Same goes for getting drafted, owning guns, aborting fetuses, and driving cars.

A think is wrong one night and because fine the next morning. It’s kind of like the Ship of Theseus.

Wow unrestricted internet access at 13? I guess I’m an overprotective parent now because I would try to avoid it long after that.

Not that I use the MPAA as any sort of authority on parenting but rated R movies are typically prohibited by unaccompanied kids under 18. The internet is way worse than any rated r movie. It’s rated XXX to use the MPAA’s metric.

No I agree it should be older than 13. I mean at an absolute floor minimum.

> The girls were 8 and 9 when they died last year after viewing the challenge, which encouraged users to choke themselves until they passed out, according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday in Superior Court in Los Angeles County.

How were they able to get on to the platform in the first place?

So TikTok allows 8 to 9 year olds to sign up on there and they don't check / verify their ages? If YouTube is able to do KYC age checks, why can't TikTok?

Bill Clinton signed COPA into law in 98, it requires companies that distribute harmful online content ensure that they aren't doing so to children, but the ACLU sued so it never took effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act

Age checks have always been an honor system sort of thing, and lets be real:

Lesson number 1 of internet access: don't share your personal info with anyone. They don't have the right to it, and you don't know what they'll really do with it.

Regardless of a majority of people completely missing the bus on this valuable lesson, it also negates the usefulness of such measures.

Fun fact: I volunteered for a group that taught middle-school kids how to code. We used Chrome books and and MIT drag-and-drop coding editor - it was awesome.

The first step was to sign-on the the Chrome books - which included a "check box" - are you 13 or older. So the first lesson we taught the kids was how to lie about your age on the internet.

(As an aside, the kids previously had parental consent, so it was legit, but still...)

Indeed:

> Lalani Erika Walton ... got her first cellphone on her 8th birthday

> Arriani Jaileen Arroyo ... received a phone when she was 7

Parenting is not as easy as you think and can be severely difficult for disadvantaged populations. While it is easy to blame parents, you can't always blame the parents.

TikTok has been the #1 app on the app store for years and is serving instructional videos of children committing acts of self-harm. Distributing content like that warrants some liability.

As always in there cases I have question to ask - where were the parents? Why they let their children use TikTok unsupervised that young?

Never mind just TikTok, why did the children have access to smartphones at all?

But then, I think that’s where you’ll find your answer. This technology pacifies, or at the very least occupies.

IMO, young kids need a phone that only has family numbers on it for texting or phone calls. No internet.

> Never mind just TikTok, why did the children have access to smartphones at all?

Perhaps because public telephones have largely disappeared?

I remember when I was a kid, before cell phones, and our parents let us do things on our own we'd make sure we had some change so that if something went wrong we could just find a payphone and call home for help. Same if we had a change of plans and needed to let our parents know we were going to be late.

I don't have kids, my nephew is watching tiktok, though. I think it's unrealistic to think you can supervise a child completely, but probably there should be an easy interface to see what your children were watching - then you can at least teach your children that some of these things are dangerous. For example, my nephew showed me a prank with a flour poured into a hairdrier - to which I commented that it's dangerous because a flour is highly flammable, and the construction of the hairdrier makes for a very good igniter (very high temperature wires + blowing the flour with air, dispersing it and increasing the surface area of contact with air).

Is TikTok the problem though? Kids can Google whatever they want and find harmful things.

This challenge was a thing in middle school back in 2006 but we didn't have phones then.

Try as you might, you can’t keep your eyes on them the whole time.

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