After her son killed himself, an Arkansas mother filed a lawsuit against China’s well-known TikTok app, claiming that her son “would be alive today had he not watched those videos” on the Chinese social media site.
Mason Edens, 16, committed suicide in November 2022. Jennie DeSerio stated to NBC News, “I really feel that Mason would be alive today had he not viewed those TikTok videos.”
After her son had a difficult breakup, DeSerio claims that TikTok’s algorithm drove Mason to take his own life by pushing content that supported suicide.
Mason’s mother said that just before he passed away, her son had “liked” hundreds of explicit TikTok videos about breakups, sadness, and suicide. DeSerio went on to say that she had discovered at least fifteen films that Mason had enjoyed that explicitly urged suicide, five of which supported the technique he had employed.
According to NBC, some of these pro-suicide films are still available on the Chinese site more than a year later.
DeSerio is now allegedly involved in a lawsuit with eight other grieving parents, who together claim that product faults from many social networking corporations caused their children’s deaths.
The Chinese app allegedly targeted Mason with videos that encouraged self-harm and death, according to the lawsuit.
The complaint claims that “TikTok targeted Mason with AI powered feed-based techniques.” “It gathered his personal data without his awareness or approval, and in ways that well surpassed what a sane customer would expect or permit.”
“It then targeted him with severe and lethal topics, such as violence, self-harm, and suicide promotion, using such personal data,” the complaint continues.
According to NBC, TikTok and other social media corporations are the target of at least four further lawsuits.
In a separate complaint this month, two tribal nations allegedly filed a claim alleging that TikTok, Meta, Snap, and Google are addictive and harmful, and that this has resulted in an increase in Native American suicide rates.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a single condition or incident “rarely triggers” suicide, underscoring the complexity of the issue.
Rather, there are other things that might raise risk on an individual, interpersonal, social, and cultural level. According to the CDC, “these risk factors include circumstances or issues that may raise a person’s likelihood of attempting suicide.”
However, TikTok has previously demonstrated in a number of different ways that it poses a risk to children and teenagers.
A bill that would require ByteDance to sell the app within a year or face being banned in the US is now being discussed by US politicians as a national security threat by TikTok, whose parent firm ByteDance is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
President Joe Biden signed the bill into law this week.
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