A US appeals court has revived a lawsuit against TikTok filed by the mother of a 10-year-old girl who died after participating in a viral “Blackout Challenge” that challenged users of the social media platform to choke themselves until they passed out.
While a federal law generally protects internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by users, the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that the law does not prevent Nyla Anderson’s mother from claiming that TikTok’s algorithm recommended her daughter take the challenge.
U.S. Circuit Judge Patty Schwartz, writing for a three-judge panel, said Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act only immunizes information provided by third parties, not recommendations made by TikTok itself through its platform’s underlying algorithms.
He acknowledged that the decision differs from previous rulings by his court and others, which had held that Section 230 insulates an online platform from liability for failing to prevent users from sending harmful messages to others.
But he said that argument was no longer valid following a US Supreme Court ruling in July that considered whether state laws designed to restrict social media platforms’ power to censor objectionable content infringed on his right to freedom of expression.
In those cases, the Supreme Court held that the platform’s algorithms reflect “editorial decisions” about “compiling third-party speech in the way it wants.” Under that logic, content curation using algorithms is the company’s own speech, which is not protected by Section 230, Schwartz said.
“TikTok makes choices about the content it recommends and promotes to specific users, and in doing so, it engages in its own first-party speech,” they wrote.
TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
Tuesday’s ruling reversed a lower court judge’s decision to dismiss a case filed by Tawaina Anderson against TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance on Section 230 grounds.
He filed the suit in 2021 following the death of his daughter Nailah after she attempted the blackout challenge using a purse strap hanging in her mother’s closet.
“Big Tech has lost its ‘get out of jail free card,'” the mother’s attorney, Jeffrey Goodman, said in a statement.
U.S. Circuit Judge Paul Mattey partially agreed with Tuesday’s ruling, saying TikTok could choose to serve content that appeals to children’s “worst tastes” and “lowest virtues” in a “pursuit of profit above all other values.”
“But he cannot claim immunity that Congress did not grant,” he wrote.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
