Tik Tok’s blackout challenge turned out to be an extremely painful disaster

After Tik Tok’s deadly blackout challenge claimed the lives of several children, the company has faced a class-action lawsuit from the parents of the victims.

Tik Tok has recently faced numerous complaints from parents who claim that their children died of suffocation after trying the “blackout challenge” which was done by some users of this program. A lawsuit filed against the company in June alleges that at least seven children have died attempting the challenge over the past year. The complaint states that the blackout challenge encourages users to strangle themselves with a belt, bag strap, or similar object in order to pass out.

All the children who died according to these reports were less than 15 years old. The latest lawsuit filed by the parents of 8-year-old Lalani Walton and 9-year-old Ariani Arroyo. However, the names of several other children who have died after doing the Tik Tok blackout challenge have also been cited as evidence against the social media.

Blocking Tik Tok blackout challenge search results

Nyla Anderson, the mother of a 10-year-old boy from Pennsylvania, also sued the company, claiming that the program imposes very dangerous and unacceptable challenges on children. In response to the lawsuit, TikTok told The Washington Post that it had blocked users from accessing the Black Oak Challenge’s search results.

However, Smith and Arroyo’s recent lawsuit alleges that their children were exposed to the challenge without doing a search, and that TikTok placed it right in front of their eyes on the For You page. The lawsuit accuses the company of specifically and programmatically making Blackout Challenge videos available to children.

Tik Tok’s reaction to the challenging Blackout

The spokesperson of Tik Tok said in response to the blackout challenge in Tik Tok:

This troubling challenge, which many seem to have encountered through sources other than TikTok, predated our platform and was never born through TikTok. We are committed to user security and will remove malicious content if found. We extend our deepest sympathy to the families of the lost children.

Challenges are one of the main and experimental parts of Tik Tok, to the extent that the competitors of this platform are trying to integrate this fascinating entertainment with their programs. Some of these challenges simply involve performing a dance move, while others have their own complexities. Another infamous challenge that became popular among users of the app encouraged students to steal or destroy school property. The platform has become so notorious for its challenges that it sometimes links TikTok to content originating from other sites or apps.

Smith and Arroyo’s lawsuit argues that because TikTok promotes certain challenges on its platform, it has a duty to monitor videos and entertainment shared, posted or published on its app to ensure that Please note that dangerous and deadly videos and challenges have no place on this platform.

Tik Tok has also faced lawsuits and fines in the past regarding children’s access to its platform. In 2019, the company agreed to pay $5.7 million to clear charges from the Federal Trade Commission that it will now allow users under 13 to sign up only with parental permission.

A year later, the platform introduced a mode called “Family Pairing” that allows parents to link their accounts to their children’s accounts and monitor the content they send and the amount of time they spend on the app.