Fiona Lamdin,West of England home and social affairs correspondentand
Jonathan Holmes,West of England
A mother who is one of a group of parents suing TikTok after the deaths of their children said she wants “accountability” from the social media firm.
Ellen Roome, from Gloucestershire, is in America for the first day of the hearing, filed by the Social Media Victims Law Centre. She said: “It’s about time we held them to account and said ‘what are you showing our children?'”
The lawsuit claims her son Julian “Jools” Sweeney, Isaac Kenevan, Archie Battersbee, Noah Gibson, and Maia Walsh all died while attempting a “blackout challenge”.
A TikTok spokesperson said: “We strictly prohibit content that promotes or encourages dangerous behaviour.”
Roome has been campaigning for legislation, called Jools’ Law, that would allow parents to access the social media accounts of their children if they die.
She has been trying to obtain data from TikTok and its parent company ByteDance that she thinks could provide clarity around his death.
The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware, claims the children’s deaths were “the foreseeable result of ByteDance’s engineered addiction-by-design and programming decisions”, which were “aimed at pushing children into maximising their engagement with TikTok by any means necessary”.
Roome said: “We have our first hearing with TikTok and it’s called a Motion to Dismiss hearing.
“So TikTok are trying to kick us out and our lawyers are saying ‘no, we’ve got a case here’.
“If we get past that stage, we get to discovery, where TikTok have to release our children’s data if they haven’t deleted it.”
Roome said the case “is not about money”.
“I want to see what my child was looking at, and if it is social media, I want accountability.
“Social media companies are feeding our children harmful material.
“They make their products addictive by design so they automatically have hooked in children and adults.
“Hopefully we’re successful, because it’s about time these big companies actually became accountable and took some responsibility.
“I just don’t feel they’ve got any morals about looking after our children properly.”
In a statement, TikTok said: “Our deepest sympathies remain with these families.
“We strictly prohibit content that promotes or encourages dangerous behaviour.
“Using robust detection systems and dedicated enforcement teams to proactively identify and remove this content, we remove 99% that’s found to break these rules before it is reported to us.”
The spokesperson added that TikTok is bidding to dismiss the filing because the court has no jurisdiction over defendants mainly based in the UK and that established US law, like the First Amendment of the US Constitution, bars liability for third-party content hosted on TikTok.