LOS ANGELES — Eight-year-old Lalani Erika Walton wanted to become “TikTok famous.” Instead, she wound up dead.
Hers is one of two such tragedies that prompted a linked pair of wrongful death lawsuits filed Friday in Los Angeles County Superior Court against the social media giant. The company’s app fed Lalani and Arriani Jaileen Arroyo, 9, videos associated with a viral trend called the blackout challenge in which participants attempt to choke themselves into unconsciousness, the cases allege; both of the young girls died after trying to join in.
It’s an indication that TikTok — the wildly popular, algorithmically curated video app that has its U.S. headquarters in Culver City in the Los Angeles area — is a defective product, says the Social Media Victims Law Center, the law firm behind the suits and a self-described “legal resource for parents of children harmed by social media.” TikTok pushed Lalani and Arriani videos of the dangerous trend, is engineered to be addictive and didn’t offer the girls or their parents adequate safety features, the Law Center says, all in the name of maximizing ad revenue.
