GRIEVING MOM SPEAKS OUT
Warns kids about social media perils
Tuesday would have been Cash Anderson's 14th birthday.
As friends and family gathered in his bedroom in Saskatoon to celebrate with cupcakes and sparklers, the fire alarm went off.
“That made me giggle, because that's just something Cash would do,” recalls his mother, Melanie Anderson.
Nearly three weeks after her son's death, Anderson said she wasn't sure what the day would look like, but all of the laughter coming from his room made her feel his large presence there again.
“It was happy, it was celebratory. And I never expected that.”
Anderson says Cash died as the result of trying the `blackout' or `pass out challenge,' a trend on video platform Tiktok that encourages participants to choke themselves to the point of losing consciousness.
“Anything that you're doing to ever try and make yourself choke, pass out, blackout, the way you're doing that is by depriving your brain of oxygen,” said Dr. Ayisha Kurji, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Saskatchewan.
“So any in any way, shape or form, this challenge is dangerous.”
The `challenge' isn't new, existing in some form for decades. Anderson said she's spoken with parents who have lost children in a similar manner after they heard about it by word of mouth.
The Tiktok platform has made it much more accessible, and that's cause for concern, Kurji said.
“Now, even if your friends don't know about it, if you're on social media, you can see what's happening all around the world. And if you're on social media a lot and you are seeing a lot of these challenges, then it almost seems normal to do it.”
Her advice to parents concerned about social media habits is to start by having an open conversation with their kids.
Anderson said she wants to see more stringent filtering on apps like Tiktok and Snapchat, to protect children from exposure to dangerous content.
In January, the parents of a 10-year-old girl in Italy said she died of asphyxiation when she participated in the challenge on Tiktok, prompting authorities to launch an investigation into possible incitement to suicide.
Tiktok, owned by Chinese company Bytedance, previously floated the idea of creating a coalition of social media firms in order to better identify and remove harmful content.
The company's transparency report for July to December 2020, released Wednesday, says the app does not allow users to post content “depicting them partaking in, or encouraging others to partake in, dangerous activities that may lead to serious injury or death.”
In any way, shape or form, this (choking) challenge is dangerous.
DR. AYISHA KURJI, University of Saskatchewan
Tiktok has updated its policies on self-harm and suicide and expanded parental control guardrails, according to the report.
In that period, the company says, it removed about 90-million videos for violating the app's community guidelines or terms of service, which is less than one per cent of all videos uploaded.
Of those that were reported and manually removed, 6.2 per cent were flagged under “suicide, selfharm, and dangerous acts.”
Approximately 100-million videos were removed in the first half of the year; 13.4 per cent of reported content was attributable to that category.
Tiktok did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Cash was a Grade 8 student at Chief Whitecap School. In a Feb. 8 letter sent to parents, Principal Harold Robertson remembered him as an accomplished skateboarder and “energetic, compassionate and caring young man.”
Skateboarding was his one true passion, Anderson said.
“It's like the colour in his world went on when he was on that skateboard,” she said. “He just had passion for life and for everything that he did. I loved that about him.”