Incident 286: TikTok’s "For You" Allegedly Pushed Fatal “Blackout” Challenge Videos to Two Young Girls
Description: TikTok’s recommendation algorithm was alleged in a lawsuit to have intentionally and repeatedly pushed videos of the “blackout” challenge onto children’s feeds, incentivizing their participation which ultimately resulted in the death of two young girls.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: TikTok developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Lalani Erika Renee Walton , Arriani Jaileen Arroyo , Lalani Erika Renee Walton's family , Arriani Jaileen Arroyo's family , TikTok young users and TikTok users.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
286
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2021-02-26
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
The families of two young girls who allegedly died as a result of a viral TikTok challenge have sued the social media platform, claiming its “dangerous” algorithms are to blame for their children’s deaths.
Parents of two girls who died in a…
The parents of two girls who said their children died as a result of a “blackout challenge” on TikTok are suing the company, claiming its algorithm intentionally served the children dangerous content that led to their deaths.
The girls were…
TikTok’s recommendation algorithm pushes self-harm and eating disorder content to teenagers within minutes of them expressing interest in the topics, research suggests.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that the video-shar…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
