“A 12-year-old child dies after a Tiktok challenge”, “a young woman has a heart attack after a challenge”… Do your children participate in challenges that they consider dangerous, even very ¨s dangerous, via the Tiktok platform? Some news items report deaths due to the Benadryl challenge, for example, which consists of ingesting antihistamines and which recently killed a 15-year-old girl. The “Skull Breaker Challenge” had doctors worried in February 2020. The social network comes from publish a great survey on their awareness of the dangers of certain movements and on the effects on their mental health.
10,000 people were questioned: teenagers, parents but also teachers, coming from Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, Mexico, US, UK, Vietnam and Argentina. Faced with the responses, psychiatrists and online safety experts have formulated opinions for Tiktok to adapt its prevention content and its internal monitoring.. “We know that dangerous challenges have had a devastating effect on children and are a source of concern for parents and teachers who do not always know how to respond”, introduced the report.
Danger difficult to identify, shocking content
It appears that 14% of teenagers who answered the platform’s questions believe that they took part in a challenge that they found dangerousbut also that 46% of them did not really know if the challenge could present risks, and if so, which ones… This loss of reference points is accompanied by another observation, some content that evokes death, for example, shocks and affects the morale of teenagers who are exposed to it, 63% of them answer “yes” to the question of knowing if their mental health is disturbed in the face of this type of challenge.
Tiktok therefore worked on new documents in its “Safety” section, with doctors, to have a more accessible discourse and warn of dangers. There are guides for use, well-being, guides for parents who testify to the difficulty of addressing the risks with their teenagersbut also resources in case of sexual assault, eating disorders, prevention against online harassment, emergency numbers…
In addition, the network has announced to increase its surveillance around challenges with a negative impact, which would present risks, via a technology which identifies certain hashtags and the abundance of videos. Tiktok informed its willingness to automatically delete what could endanger the life of its users. “This report recognizes that children have the right to be safe in the digital world as well as in their ‘offline’ lives, that they have the right to privacy, to play, and to have the necessary information, such as being able to participate in the decisions that concern them”.
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Source: Tiktok
