Appeals Court Says TikTok Must Face Lawsuit for Child’s Death

A US Appeals court has ruled that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance must face a lawsuit regarding a 10-year-old girl’s death.

The mother of 10-year-old Nylah Anderson sued TikTok following her daughter’s death in 2021 after she copied the “Blackout Challenge,” in which TikTok users were posting videos of people choking themselves until they passed out and daring other users to do the same thing.

Nylah attempted the challenge using a purse strap she found in her mother’s closet, which resulted in Nylah losing consciousness and sustaining significant injuries that led to her death five days later.

Tawainna Anderson, Nylah’s mother, claims TikTok holds responsibility for pushing the challenge to Nylah’s For You Page through its content algorithm and is seeking an undisclosed amount of damages.

A lower court had rejected Ms Anderson’s claim, saying TikTok was not responsible for third-party content posted on its site and that it was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

However, the appeals court has now said that Section 230 only protects TikTok from “information provided by another information content provider” and not its own “expressive activity or content.”

Further, the court cited the Supreme Court’s ruling on a case in which social media platforms claim they should be able to moderate the content on their platforms as they choose.

As such, the court has decided that TikTok is responsible for what content it pushed to Nylah’s For You Page, and therefore, “Anderson’s estate may seek relief for TikTok’s knowing distribution and targeted recommendation of videos it knew could be harmful.”

Following the ruling, Nylah’s mother’s lawyer, Jeffrey Goodman, said in a statement that “Big Tech just lost its ‘get-out-of-jail-free card.’” Neither TikTok nor Bytedance have commented on the ruling.