Tik Tok
TikTok must face lawsuit for sharing 'challenge' that killed young man in the US
The popular short video app TikTok must face a lawsuit in the United States due to a type of challenge that circulated on the platform, according to the website The Verge. This is the "blackout challenge", which invited young people to basically hang themselves until they lost consciousness.
As a result of the challenge, several parents are blaming TikTok for the deaths of their children. The idea is to make the social network responsible for offering this type of video to more people within the application.
In general, technology platforms are usually protected by the so-called section 230, a legal mechanism that prevents them from being held responsible for their users' publications. It was on this basis that a court had dismissed the case.
However, the high court later ruled that the speech in question was TikTok's own, sending the case back to the lower court for reconsideration. Now, it will be up to her to determine whether TikTok can be held responsible in this specific case. The accusations also involve APP's alleged negligence.
It is worth pointing out that section 230 only protects these sites and applications from being held responsible for how they handle third-party speech, such as their users' posts. In this way, TikTok's actions themselves, such as the recommendations that the app makes to those who use it, could be outside the scope of its protection.
The case is paradigmatic because it may represent, in a certain way, a chink in the armor of digital platforms.
One of the incidents that resulted in death was that of Nylah Anderson, who accidentally hanged herself after watching videos of the blackout challenge. According to the opinion of the court responsible for judging the case, if Anderson had sought the challenge within TikTok instead of having the content suggested to her, then the platform could be seen more as a mere repository of third-party publications.
In this specific case, the judges stated that the algorithm that chooses what appears on a user's account decides what will be presented and what will not. Therefore, the algorithm, responsible for recommending the blackout challenge to Nylah Anderson, is covered within TikTok's own activity, and does not fall under section 230.