TikTok faces lawsuit over death of 10-year-old girl, US court rules
By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court has reopened a lawsuit against TikTok after the mother of a 10-year-old girl died after she took part in a viral “blackout challenge” in which users of the social media platform were encouraged to strangle themselves until they passed out.
While federal law typically protects internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by users, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled Tuesday that the law does not prevent Nylah Anderson’s mother from claiming that TikTok’s algorithm recommended the challenge to her daughter.
Patty Shwartz, a U.S. District Court judge and author of the three-judge panel, explained that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 only immunizes information provided by third parties, but not recommendations made by TikTok itself through an algorithm underlying the platform.
She acknowledged that the decision represents a departure from previous rulings by her and other courts that Section 230 exempts an online platform from liability if it fails to prevent its users from transmitting harmful messages to others.
But she said that argument no longer holds water following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in July that addressed whether state laws designed to limit social media platforms’ power to block content they deem objectionable violated her right to free speech.
In those cases, the Supreme Court ruled that a platform’s algorithm reflected “editorial judgments” about “assembling the speech of others in the manner it desired.” Shwartz said that by that logic, content curation using algorithms was speech by the company itself, not protected by Section 230.
“TikTok makes decisions about the content recommended and promoted to specific users, thereby engaging in its own first-hand opinion expression,” she wrote.
TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
Tuesday’s ruling overturned a lower court judge’s decision to dismiss Tawainna Anderson’s Section 230 lawsuit against TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
She filed suit after her daughter Nylah died in 2021 while attempting the blackout challenge with a purse strap hanging in her mother’s closet.
“Big tech companies just lost their get-out-of-jail-free card,” Jeffrey Goodman, the mother’s attorney, said in a statement.
In an opinion, U.S. appeals judge Paul Matey partially agreed with Tuesday’s ruling, saying TikTok puts “profits above all other values” and can choose to offer children content that emphasizes “the lowest tastes” and “the lowest virtues.”
“But it cannot claim immunity that Congress has not granted,” he wrote.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
