Mother whose child died in TikTok challenge urges US court to revive lawsuit
By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) — A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday wrestled with whether the video-based social media platform TikTok could be sued for causing a 10-year-old girl's death by promoting a deadly «blackout challenge» that encouraged people to choke themselves.
Members of a three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted during oral arguments that a key federal law typically shields internet companies like TikTok from lawsuits for content posted by users.
But some judges questioned whether Congress in adopting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 could have imagined the growth of platforms like TikTok that do not just host content but recommend it to users using complex algorithms.
«I think we can all probably agree that this technology didn't exist in the mid-1990s, or didn't exist as widely deployed as it is now,» U.S. Circuit Judge Paul Matey said.
Tawainna Anderson sued TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance after her daughter Nylah in 2021 attempted the blackout challenge using a purse strap hung in her mother's closet. She lost consciousness, suffered severe injuries, and died five days later.
Anderson's lawyer, Jeffrey Goodman, told the court that while Section 230 provides TikTok some legal protection, it does not bar claims that its product was defective and that its algorithm pushed videos about the blackout challenge to the child.
«This was TikTok consistently sending dangerous challenges to an impressionable 10-year-old, sending multiple versions of this blackout challenge, which led her to believe this was cool and this would be fun,» Goodman said.
But TikTok's lawyer, Andrew Pincus, argued the panel should uphold a lower court judge's
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