A 10-year-old girl, Antonella Sicomero, had been found hanging from a towel rack in January with a bathrobe belt around her neck. In the weeks before, TikTok’s trust and safety team, which works to protect users and defend the company’s reputation, had begun investigating a similar incident in Palermo, Sicily. But the company was aware that children not old enough to have profiles on its app were dying doing the blackout challenge. There was no press coverage of Arriani’s death, and TikTok didn’t learn about it for months. It’s a modern incarnation of choking dares that have been around for decades, only now they’re being delivered to children by powerful social media algorithms and reaching those too young to fully grasp the risk. Kids around the world were choking themselves with household items until they blacked out, filming the adrenaline rush they got from regaining consciousness and then posting the videos on social media. The game had a name: the blackout challenge. They were playing a game, he said, that they saw on TikTok. BloombergĪ few days later, after Arriani was buried wearing a princess dress and tiara, her nails freshly painted, the boy told his parents what had happened. Now she was hanging about half a metre from the ground, kicking and desperately scratching at her neck. The boy had watched Arriani climb atop a toy chest, wrap a metal dog leash around her neck and hook the buckle to the wardrobe door hinge. Their mother was at a Bible study class, and their father was in his basement workshop, out of earshot. It was February last year, and he’d been playing with his nine-year-old sister, Arriani, before bedtime. The five-year-old boy’s panicked cries echoed down the hallway of the Arroyos’ three-bedroom weatherboard house in Milwaukee.
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