The two siblings had been playing together in Arriani’s bedroom, the suit said, but when their father rushed upstairs to check on her, he found his daughter “hanging from the family dog’s leash.”Īrriani was rushed to the hospital and placed on a ventilator, but it was too late - the girl had lost all brain function, the suit said, and was eventually taken off life support. 26, 2021, Arriani’s father was working in the basement when her younger brother Edwardo came downstairs and said that Arriani wasn’t moving. She “gradually became obsessive” about the app, it said. Lalani was “under the belief that if she posted a video of herself doing the Blackout Challenge, then she would become famous,” it said, yet the young girl “did not appreciate or understand the dangerous nature of what TikTok was encouraging her to do.”Īrriani, from Milwaukee, also loved to post song and dance videos on TikTok, the suit said. The police, who took Lalani’s phone and tablet, later told her stepmother that the girl had been watching blackout challenge videos “on repeat,” the suit said. But upon waking up, the suit said, her stepmother went to Lalani’s bedroom and found the girl “hanging from her bed with a rope around her neck.” When they got home from the trip, Lalani’s stepmother told her the two could go swimming later, and then took a brief nap. Midway through that month, Lalani told her family that bruises that had appeared on her neck were the result of a fall, the suit said soon after, she spent some of a 20-hour car ride with her stepmother watching what her mother would later learn had been blackout challenge videos. Lalani, who was from Texas, was an avid TikToker, posting videos of herself dancing and singing on the social network in hopes of going viral, according to the Law Center’s complaint.Īt some point in July 2021, her algorithm started surfacing videos of the self-strangulation blackout challenge, the suit said. The girls’ deaths bear striking similarities. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. headquarters in Culver City - is a defective product, said 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 said, all in the name of maximizing ad revenue. It’s an indication that TikTok - the wildly popular, algorithmically curated video app that has its U.S. The company’s app fed both 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. 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. Eight-year-old Lalani Erika Walton wanted to become “TikTok famous.” Instead, she wound up dead.
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