UK families face TikTok in US court showdown over viral challenge deaths

Grieving parents are traveling to a US court after filing a wrongful death lawsuit against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance. They’re alleging that the platform's algorithms pushed dangerous “prank and challenge” content to children who later died after attempting self-strangulation.

The lawsuit, filed in Delaware Superior Court, involves five British parents, Ellen Roome, Lisa Keneva, Hollie Dance, Liam Walsh, and Louise Gibson, who are pursuing legal action on behalf of the estates of their children, aged between 12 and 14, all of whom died in 2022.

In the court documents, the families allege that their children were “targeted” through TikTok’s content delivery and recommendation systems and then “flooded” with harmful material on the “For You” page.

The lawsuit claims TikTok “selected and pushed” a variety of dangerous prank and challenge videos to minors in the UK, including, but not limited to, the viral and deadly Blackout Challenge.

The families claim that this content contributed to their children’s deaths and that the company has repeatedly refused to release the data needed to understand what their children were exposed to in the critical period before they died.

TikTok says the “Blackout Challenge” has been blocked on the platform since 2020, and it has never found evidence that this content was trending there, as the challenge predates TikTok.

Friday’s hearing, in Delaware, is a motion to dismiss. If unsuccessful, the lawsuit will proceed to the “discovery” stage, where TikTok could be legally compelled to disclose internal records and the children’s account data.

A major point of dispute is whether the alleged challenge content can now be proven to have appeared in the children’s TikTok feeds at all.

The families argue that determining what the children were served is made harder because key account data has been erased.

According to the complaint, TikTok’s systems wiped relevant user information, which the company says is due to privacy rules, leaving no way of knowing whether the challenge content was on TikTok in each case.

The families are seeking the recovery of that information.

What is Jools’ law?

Alongside the US litigation, Ellen Roome, who believes that her 14-year-old son Jools died after an online challenge went wrong, has been campaigning in the UK for Jools’ Law, a proposal calling for the automatic preservation of a child’s online data immediately following their death.

The aim is to prevent the permanent loss of potentially critical evidence during the early stages of investigations and inquests.

“If Jools’ Law already existed in the UK, families would not have to fight in foreign courts for answers,” said Roome.

“Jools’ Law would ensure that when a child dies, their online data is automatically preserved, and that data is made available to the Coroner, not lost, deleted, or withheld.”

“Without this safeguard, evidence disappears, families are left without answers, and opportunities to protect other children are lost," she added.

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