Bereaved parents take on TikTok

A mother who is one of a group of British parents suing TikTok after the deaths of their children said she wants “accountability” from the social media firm.

Ellen Roome is in the US for the first day of the hearing, filed by the Social Media Victims Law Centre. She said: “It’s about time we held them to account and said ‘what are you showing our children?'”

The lawsuit claims her son Julian “Jools” Sweeney, Isaac Kenevan, Archie Battersbee, Noah Gibson, and Maia Walsh all died while attempting a “blackout challenge”.

A TikTok spokesperson said: “We strictly prohibit content that promotes or encourages dangerous behaviour.”

The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware, claims the children’s deaths were “the foreseeable result of ByteDance’s engineered addiction-by-design and programming decisions”, which were “aimed at pushing children into maximising their engagement with TikTok by any means necessary”.

Roome said: “We have our first hearing with TikTok and it’s called a Motion to Dismiss hearing.

“So TikTok are trying to kick us out and our lawyers are saying ‘no, we’ve got a case here’.

“If we get past that stage, we get to discovery, where TikTok have to release our children’s data if they haven’t deleted it.”

Jools, 14, died at his home in Cheltenham, Gloucesteshire, in 2022. A coroner returned a narrative verdict at his inquest and ruled out suicide. Roome believes her son died after an online challenge went wrong.

Thirteen-year-old Isaac, from Basildon, Essex, also died after it was believed he had taken part in a so-called choke challenge.

The parents of Maia, 13, who was found dead at her home in Hertfordshire in October 2022, similarly believe she was taking part in an online challenge. An inquest into her death will examine her use of TikTok.

While a coroner ruled that Archie, 12, died accidentally after a “prank or experiment” went wrong at his home in Southend-on-Sea in April 2022. The coroner said there was no evidence he was doing an online challenge at the time, as his mother believed.

In October, Roome confirmed the four original families who brought the lawsuit had been joined by Louise Gibson, from Worcestershire, who believed her 11-year-old son, Noah, died in similar circumstances.

Roome said the case “is not about money”.

“I want to see what my child was looking at, and if it is social media, I want accountability.

“Social media companies are feeding our children harmful material.

“They make their products addictive by design so they automatically have hooked in children and adults.”

She added it was time “these big companies actually became accountable and took some responsibility”.

“I just don’t feel they’ve got any morals about looking after our children properly,” Roome said.

TikTok chiefs said their “deepest sympathies remain with these families”.

“We strictly prohibit content that promotes or encourages dangerous behaviour.

“Using robust detection systems and dedicated enforcement teams to proactively identify and remove this content, we remove 99% that’s found to break these rules before it is reported to us,” a TikTok spokesperson added.

TikTok is bidding to dismiss the filing because the court has no jurisdiction over defendants mainly based in the UK and that established US law, like the First Amendment of the US Constitution, bars liability for third-party content hosted on TikTok.

Matthew Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Centre and who is representing the five parents, told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme the issue of online harm was one “politics seems to come together on”.

“Whether a person is liberal or a conservative, or republican or democrat, we all love our kids and we can come together on this. We appear to be doing so and it’s very gratifying,” he said.

Bergman said he believed with a “combination of legislation”, the “use of the civil justice system” to hold companies financially accountable and the “court of opinion” change was possible and more children could be protected from online harm.

“We see the public officials and judges and influence makers are really understanding the clear and present threat that social media poses to the mental and physically safety of our young people,” he added.