Speaker 1: From Bloomberg News and I Heart Radio. It's the big Take.
Speaker 1: I'm West Casova today. Why TikTok and young kids are
Speaker 1: a bad mix? Just a note about today's episode. It's
Speaker 1: on a difficult topic and parts of it are not
Speaker 1: easy to listen to. If there are children nearby, you
Speaker 1: might want to use headphones. Bloomberg Senior reporter Olivia Carville
Speaker 1: spent months investigating the deaths of children who participated in
Speaker 1: dangerous challenges that can be seen on TikTok, the enormously
Speaker 1: popular video sharing social network. Her reporting shows how the
Speaker 1: company has tried and failed to stop young kids, some
Speaker 1: of them under ten years old, from joining the platform,
Speaker 1: even though they're not supposed to be allowed on it.
Speaker 1: I asked Olivia to tell us what she found in
Speaker 1: her reporting for a Bloomberg Business Week, starting with why
Speaker 1: TikTok has such appeal for kids? What kids want to
Speaker 1: be when they grow up as an influencer more so
Speaker 1: than an astronaut or a teacher or a journalist. They
Speaker 1: want to be a YouTube or TikTok influencer. They want
Speaker 1: to be social media famous. They are communicating with a
Speaker 1: community of like minded people who are creating cool content,
Speaker 1: and they're looking at people that they aspire to be.
Speaker 1: We're talking more than two thirds of all teenagers in
Speaker 1: America use TikTok. Millions of kids every day are on
Speaker 1: this app more than Facebook, more than Snapchat, more than Instagram.
Speaker 1: TikTok is the coolest place to be on the Internet
Speaker 1: right now. One thing it's made TikTok so popular are
Speaker 1: the viral video challenges users post for others to copy,
Speaker 1: like a dance or a song. Overnight, millions of TikTokers
Speaker 1: are posting videos of themselves doing their own version of it.
Speaker 1: So the challenges on social media apps like TikTok really
Speaker 1: started in two thousand and twenty, when the pandemic shut
Speaker 1: down schools and kids were at home just on their phones. Initially,
Speaker 1: these challenges were pretty harmless. They were kind of cute.
Speaker 1: I saw pits being dressed up in different outfits and
Speaker 1: four generations of one family dancing in the same way.
Speaker 1: But as is usually typical when children or teenagers are involved,
Speaker 1: they started to get edgier or more dangerous. The crate
Speaker 1: challenge where kids would climb stepped milk crates and some
Speaker 1: of them would fall and injure themselves. We're talking milk
Speaker 1: crates that were like eight crates high. Or they do
Speaker 1: challenges lie the cinnamon challenge, where they'd eat a spoonful
Speaker 1: of cinnamon, which can actually cause minor lung damage if
Speaker 1: they inhale it into their lungs. They were doing things
Speaker 1: like dropping pennies into a partially plugged in phone charger
Speaker 1: waiting for it to spark, and in some cases this
Speaker 1: resulted in catching light and property destruction charges. We'd see
Speaker 1: even more dangerous challenges throughout with the skull breaker challenge,
Speaker 1: where two people would encourage a third to jump in
Speaker 1: the ear and then they'd kick their legs out from
Speaker 1: under them and they had land on the ground, sometimes
Speaker 1: on their head, and this would result in concussions. We
Speaker 1: also saw the fire accelerant challenge, where kids would actually
Speaker 1: light themselves on fire accidentally. We've seen children who are seven, eight,
Speaker 1: nine years old, who are too young to be on
Speaker 1: TikTok participating in dangerous and tragically, in some cases, deadly challenges.
Speaker 1: You heard Olivia say just now that children this young
Speaker 1: are too young to be on TikTok. That's because TikTok,
Speaker 1: like other social media platforms, has an age gate, kids
Speaker 1: under the age of thirteen aren't allowed to have full
Speaker 1: access to the apps content. What's interesting about this age
Speaker 1: gate is actually that the number thirteen is largely arbitrary.
Speaker 1: There's no scientific research or pediatricians or child psychologists that
Speaker 1: say kids over the age of thirteen are mature enough
Speaker 1: to handle this kind of content. The reason why platforms
Speaker 1: say you have to be over the age of thirteen
Speaker 1: to get access to them is actually because they don't
Speaker 1: want to violate already existing child privacy laws in the US.
Speaker 1: Children under thirteen are supposed to be directed to a
Speaker 1: walled off version of the platform where the videos are
Speaker 1: scrubbed of content that TikTok says isn't appropriate for kids.
Speaker 1: Art Kids are smart, they're digitally savvy, and they don't
Speaker 1: want to be on the child version of TikTok. They
Speaker 1: want to be on the cool version of TikTok. They
Speaker 1: want to be on the adult version of TikTok. So
Speaker 1: they're lying about their age to gain access to the platform.
Speaker 1: Millions of children today are on TikTok who are under
Speaker 1: the age of thirteen when they shouldn't be. If you're
Speaker 1: under the age of thirteen, and you try to sign
Speaker 1: up for TikTok and you just say that you're older.
Speaker 1: Is that it does TikTok do anything to try to
Speaker 1: verify your age. The platform does many things to try
Speaker 1: and weed out these underage accounts, but it's difficult. Some
Speaker 1: of the things they do is use text based analytics
Speaker 1: to scrape through, you know, bios and people's profile pages.
Speaker 1: So say you download an account and you write in
Speaker 1: your bio, I'm eleven years old. The artificial intelligence is
Speaker 1: good enough to detect that and remove you. They also
Speaker 1: get community users to report in suspected under age accounts.
Speaker 1: If you're nine years old and on TikTok and posting
Speaker 1: regularly as the account holder, other people who use TikTok
Speaker 1: can report you to the platform and you'll get taken down.
Speaker 1: They also train their moderators to look out for suspected
Speaker 1: child accounts, and every three months the platform removes twenty
Speaker 1: million suspected child accounts from TikTok. This is a huge number,
Speaker 1: but TikTok has one billion users today worldwide. Millions of
Speaker 1: children are on the platform and lying about their age
Speaker 1: to access it. So all these measures that they're adopting
Speaker 1: to try and find those suspected under age accounts largely
Speaker 1: aren't working. Olivia's story is centered on an especially gruesome
Speaker 1: video challenge that's been making the rounds on TikTok, the
Speaker 1: Blackout Challenge. What it is is children choking themselves until
Speaker 1: they lose consciousness, blacking out and then waking up and
Speaker 1: getting that adrenaline rush or that high of regaining consciousness.
Speaker 1: They're filming this and uploading it to social media as
Speaker 1: if it's a fun, cool thing to do. The challenge
Speaker 1: requests that you use a household object to try and
Speaker 1: choke yourself, So in some cases I've seen children using belts,
Speaker 1: using nick ties, using dog leashes, using shoelaces to choke
Speaker 1: themselves until they pass out. If this sounds familiar, it
Speaker 1: might be because choking games like the Blackhout Challenge didn't
Speaker 1: start on TikTok. Well. The Blackout Challenge actually dates back to,
Speaker 1: you know, as far as the nineteen thirties. It was
Speaker 1: around before we even had an iPhone. But social media
Speaker 1: has amplified its spread. Not only is it easier to
Speaker 1: reach a huge range of kids, it's reaching children who
Speaker 1: are younger and younger kids who are too young to
Speaker 1: understand the risks. One of those children was a little
Speaker 1: girl named Arianni Arroyo. Arianni Arroyo was a nine year
Speaker 1: old girl who lived down in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Artie was fashion.
Speaker 1: Addie was glitter and glad, and she just had her
Speaker 1: own little style and everything. That's Arianni's mother, Olivia, spoke
Speaker 1: to both of her parents. My name is Christo a
Speaker 1: Royal Roman, my name is Eddie Berto, a Royal Roman,
Speaker 1: and my daughter is Arianni Jaylene Arroyo. She loved dancing,
Speaker 1: and dancing was the first trend that she really started
Speaker 1: engaging in TikTok. She would do all the dances she
Speaker 1: record herself and um, it just grew from there. When
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen shut down her school and she was at
Speaker 1: home all the time, she became obsessed with TikTok. She
Speaker 1: was using it every day. She was trying all of
Speaker 1: these challenges with her younger brother, doing things like holding
Speaker 1: water in your mouth until you start giggling, or one
Speaker 1: challenge they tried was only eating red food for twenty
Speaker 1: four hours. They loved it. They thought it was really
Speaker 1: fun day. It was addicting. The TikTok is like something
Speaker 1: that lures you in, makes a kid believe that they're
Speaker 1: going to be famous. One evening in early two thousand
Speaker 1: and twenty one, Arianni was playing with her little brother
Speaker 1: before bedtime. It was a Wednesday, it was a normal day.
Speaker 1: Her father was downstairs in the basement and his workshop.
Speaker 1: From what we understand, she used a dog leash. This
Speaker 1: was a middle dog leash. Her parents had recently purchased
Speaker 1: it because the kids really wanted to get a puppy,
Speaker 1: and they bought the dog leash to show their children
Speaker 1: that they were willing to buy them a dog. And
Speaker 1: they were playing with this dog leash, and Arianny she
Speaker 1: read the middle dog leash around her neck and she
Speaker 1: hooked the buckle onto the hinge of a wardrobe door,
Speaker 1: and she slipped off the toy chests that she was
Speaker 1: standing on, and she was left hanging about two ft
Speaker 1: from the ground. She couldn't scream out. She couldn't cry out.
Speaker 1: Her father was out of earshot anyway, and her little
Speaker 1: brother had to run downstairs and tell his dad that
Speaker 1: Sissy's tangled. Her father came upstairs to see what he
Speaker 1: was talking about, and that's when he found Ariane lifeless,
Speaker 1: hanging by this dog leash from the hinge of the
Speaker 1: wardrobe door. He tried CPR, She never regained consciousness, and
Speaker 1: she she died a week later. As you can imagine,
Speaker 1: Arianne's parents are heartbroken. They told me that their happiness
Speaker 1: had died with their daughter. That this feeling just weighs
Speaker 1: heavy on your chest. That it's um hard to move
Speaker 1: on and hard to continue living when you know you
Speaker 1: lose a child in that way. One of the things
Speaker 1: her mother said to me is that she she knew
Speaker 1: that she had to be protective of the outside, but
Speaker 1: what she didn't realize is that she had to be
Speaker 1: protective of the inside. That this danger actually came through
Speaker 1: her child's phone, a social media app. I never thought
Speaker 1: in my mind that that could ever result to heat
Speaker 1: losing a daughter. As we've done everything to protect our children,
Speaker 1: and you think they're in the safety of your home.
Speaker 1: We're home, My kids were home, everybody was home. A
Speaker 1: week after Arianny died, her parents asked her younger brother
Speaker 1: what they were doing the night of the accident. He
Speaker 1: said they were playing a game like they'd seen on TikTok.
Speaker 1: My son told us, like we played hang the Cheen,
Speaker 1: Like what's he in the chee. He was only four
Speaker 1: years old, so we didn't know the name of the game.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't until after her funeral that they were
Speaker 1: asking her friends, you know, who were her age, who
Speaker 1: had known what she was doing around that time, and
Speaker 1: then her friends told me, oh, that's black Out challenging,
Speaker 1: And then I'm like, what's black out Challenge? I didn't know.
Speaker 1: We didn't know anything like that existed. After doing some research,
Speaker 1: they discovered another child had died from allegedly participating in
Speaker 1: this challenge, a ten year old girl in Italy. Our
Speaker 1: story continues after the break, I asked Olivia what more
Speaker 1: could TikTok have done to stop a child like Arianni
Speaker 1: Arroyo from viewing videos like the Blackout Challenge. TikTok doesn't
Speaker 1: want this kind of content on its platform. It causes
Speaker 1: all kinds of issues like this exact one that we're discussing.
Speaker 1: So TikTok has done a bunch of things to try
Speaker 1: and reduce Blackout Challenge video is one of those things
Speaker 1: is hiring people to sit and watch hours and hours
Speaker 1: of TikTok videos and decide if they're okay or not.
Speaker 1: The people who do this are called content moderators. Content
Speaker 1: moderators for social media apps are essentially watching all of
Speaker 1: the videos uploaded to platforms like TikTok or YouTube and
Speaker 1: trying to find any kind of content that may violate
Speaker 1: community guidelines that may be problematic for the platforms. They're
Speaker 1: training their human content moderators to take down any content
Speaker 1: that promotes or glorifies dangerous behavior, like the Blackout Challenge.
Speaker 1: They have also band hashtags connected to the Blackout Challenge
Speaker 1: in the app. When you type in blackout challenge on TikTok,
Speaker 1: now you're automatically sent through to a page that says
Speaker 1: your safety matters. You know you shouldn't be looking for
Speaker 1: dangerous content like this, and unfortunately though children have found
Speaker 1: ways to get around that. They have renamed the Blackout Challenge.
Speaker 1: They have replaced the oh of blackout and put a
Speaker 1: zero in it, or used a one instead of the L,
Speaker 1: misspelling code words, secret phrases to keep the content spreading,
Speaker 1: keep the challenge on the app because they like participating
Speaker 1: in it and they want to evade or avoid or
Speaker 1: be smarter than TikTok. It's hard for them to train
Speaker 1: moderators on what is dangerous because the word dangerous is subjective.
Speaker 1: Maybe what you think is dangerous is different to what
Speaker 1: I think is dangerous. So should you remove content of
Speaker 1: children climbing stacked milk crates? Some may say no, let
Speaker 1: the kids do what they want to do. Don't be
Speaker 1: overly paternal and take this content down. They're just having fun.
Speaker 1: But what happens if a child dies? Is that now
Speaker 1: the time to remove milk grate challenge content from TikTok.
Speaker 1: But trying to decide from the outset how dangerous is
Speaker 1: a challenge is one the difficulties that TikTok's trust and
Speaker 1: safety team faces when it comes to the blackout challenge.
Speaker 1: All along, TikTok has not wanted this content on its platform.
Speaker 1: The difficulty comes down to removing it. How do you
Speaker 1: remove this content when you have more than a billion
Speaker 1: users from multiple like almost every country around the world,
Speaker 1: uploading videos on a daily basis and doing what they
Speaker 1: can to get around the restrictions that you're placing on
Speaker 1: the app to try and keep kids safe. You mentioned
Speaker 1: trust in safety, and that's another term that you hear
Speaker 1: in connection with social media platforms quite a bit. What
Speaker 1: is a trust in safety team? Trust and safety are
Speaker 1: effectively the cleaners of the Internet. These guys are the fixes.
Speaker 1: When things go wrong, trust and safety comes in to
Speaker 1: clean up the mess. So for the past year, I've
Speaker 1: been talking to people who work within the trust and
Speaker 1: safety industry trying to figure out how hard is the job,
Speaker 1: What are some of the complexities or challenges that they face.
Speaker 1: A lot of people who enter the trust and safety
Speaker 1: industry actually come from social justice or law enforcement backgrounds.
Speaker 1: What the ultimate goal is by joining these big tech
Speaker 1: platforms is to try and protect users. But once they're
Speaker 1: inside the company, and once they're actually have a seat
Speaker 1: at the table and work there, they realize that their
Speaker 1: job is twofold, protect the users and protect the company's reputation.
Speaker 1: One of the most challenging things for the dozens of
Speaker 1: trust and safety workers that I spoke with is this
Speaker 1: feeling that you're effectively cleaning up for the company rather
Speaker 1: than doing everything you can to protect users on the
Speaker 1: front end, and on TikTok in particular, which is a
Speaker 1: platform that has seen explosive growth and really high turnover.
Speaker 1: Within the trust and safety team, that's because the job
Speaker 1: is so damn hard, you know, trying to moderate the
Speaker 1: platform and keep users safe. When some of the kids
Speaker 1: are as young as six or seven years old, what
Speaker 1: do you do when they're lying about their age? What
Speaker 1: do you do when the appearance allow them on the
Speaker 1: platform and allow them to lie about their age? How
Speaker 1: do you handle that? As not only TikTok the company,
Speaker 1: but you, the trust and safety worker who was told
Speaker 1: to detect child accounts on the platform, how are you
Speaker 1: going to go about doing that? This question of age
Speaker 1: verification is now front and center as pressure increases on
Speaker 1: social media companies to do something about underage children other platforms.
Speaker 1: We've seen a sea change in Silicon Valley in the
Speaker 1: last year to eighteen months where platforms are aware that
Speaker 1: the age verification issue has kind of become the elephant
Speaker 1: in the room. This is a massive issue not only
Speaker 1: for TikTok, but for every social media platform is trying
Speaker 1: to detect underage kids and keep those who use the
Speaker 1: platform in the correct and age appropriate experience. We're seeing
Speaker 1: regulatory shifts and legislation being written calling out TICH companies
Speaker 1: for putting their own profits over the best interests of children,
Speaker 1: and these new laws that are being written actually forced
Speaker 1: TICH companies to ensure that they know the age of
Speaker 1: their users with reasonable level of certainty, and how exactly
Speaker 1: are they supposed to do this? Well, it turns out
Speaker 1: there are companies that specialize in it. This third party
Speaker 1: companies ones called Hive and they're based in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: There's another company called Yoti that's based in the UK
Speaker 1: and they specialize an age estimation. And we've seen different
Speaker 1: platforms like Twitter, Be Real, Pixar, read It, Instagram partner
Speaker 1: with these third parties to try and ensure that their
Speaker 1: age verification efforts are as good as they possibly can be. Well,
Speaker 1: I really wanted to know, like how effective are these
Speaker 1: third parties? Does it actually work or you know they're
Speaker 1: just making it up? Like how do you know that
Speaker 1: a company that says it's going to be able to
Speaker 1: guess a user's age can actually do it? And if so,
Speaker 1: why isn't every platform in the world using them? The
Speaker 1: third party company Olivia mentioned just now Hive. It's building
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence tools to verify the age of users. How
Speaker 1: do we build AI models that are very focused on
Speaker 1: solving real world business problems? Problem of constant moderation, age detection,
Speaker 1: object detection, hate speech, bulling detection. These type of aspects
Speaker 1: that we saw that there was a lot of generally
Speaker 1: human labor involved in and wasn't very scalable, especially when
Speaker 1: you consider the amount of digital content being produced on
Speaker 1: the Internet. That's Kevin who, the CEO and founder of Hive,
Speaker 1: define what it is you're trying to detect and then
Speaker 1: train the model on that data by actually having millions
Speaker 1: or hundreds of millions of examples of what that means.
Speaker 1: Imagine training a model is kind of like teaching a
Speaker 1: small child to concepts. Right if you were to take
Speaker 1: a different problem like recognizing you know, animals and a farm,
Speaker 1: cats and dogs. Right, when you teach the small child,
Speaker 1: you showed them examples in picture book. Here's what a
Speaker 1: cat looks like, Here's what a dog looks like, Here's
Speaker 1: what a pig looks like. And generally the child will
Speaker 1: learn from that from those examples. In our world, how
Speaker 1: we view this problem is you take a person, it's
Speaker 1: on camera, it's in a video, and we do run
Speaker 1: a model that looks at a few things. It looks
Speaker 1: at their face, but it look also looks at the
Speaker 1: rest of their body, and it makes the prediction of
Speaker 1: age based on those features. So it's using the input
Speaker 1: of the person's facial features and their body and in
Speaker 1: general or anything else that we can kind of say
Speaker 1: is it's a kind of related to the physical makeup
Speaker 1: of that person that produces a results on age, kind
Speaker 1: of saying, when you look at someone, you're not totally
Speaker 1: sure exactly why you know that person seems like they're
Speaker 1: nine years old, but your instinct is that they are
Speaker 1: because of enough pattern recognition. That's when we trained this
Speaker 1: model to do as well. We're actually predicting the age
Speaker 1: without knowing identity whatsoever. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: found really surprising during the reporting of this story is
Speaker 1: as I was looking into Ariani A Royo's k I
Speaker 1: actually saw a screenshot of her TikTok account. She was
Speaker 1: only nine years old, so she wasn't meant to even
Speaker 1: be on the platform. But when you look at her account,
Speaker 1: you can see she's a kid. You can see in
Speaker 1: her bio photo that it's her nine year old face.
Speaker 1: She wasn't trying to hide herself or trying to lie
Speaker 1: to the platform. Sure, she entered in the wrong date
Speaker 1: of birth to access the app, but so did all
Speaker 1: her friends. Olivia decided to put HIDES technology to the test,
Speaker 1: so she sent them a short video clip ARIANI had
Speaker 1: filmed of herself for social media. And the way our
Speaker 1: models work on videos, as we look at frames and
Speaker 1: we samples, we usually do a one frame per seconds.
Speaker 1: In this case, I believe the video was something like
Speaker 1: eleven seconds, So we produced eleven seconds of results, and
Speaker 1: then we simply take the average of that to see
Speaker 1: what our model would predict, and we've predicted that her
Speaker 1: age was around ten years old. It took HIVES software
Speaker 1: three seconds to determine that Ariane was ten years old,
Speaker 1: and she died three months shy of her tenth birthday.
Speaker 1: Kevin Guo says that level of accuracy is fairly standard
Speaker 1: for age prediction software. There's really no reason, in our opinion,
Speaker 1: the humans should be looking at any of this. Our
Speaker 1: models are going to handle this at necent accuracy, really
Speaker 1: at near Yeah. One of the stats we like to
Speaker 1: give is our you know, we'll catch content of bad
Speaker 1: content while making a mistake unless than one percent of it.
Speaker 1: The way that we've thought about it with all of
Speaker 1: our partners and platforms we work with today is we've
Speaker 1: never yet encountered a problem where their scale was too
Speaker 1: much for us to handle. And this includes some of
Speaker 1: the largest platforms in the world. So I'm very confident
Speaker 1: that if a platform we're actually aligned and trying to
Speaker 1: solve this problem, the hardware and the costs can't keep up. Accordingly,
Speaker 1: this is intended to be a real time product. In
Speaker 1: this case, you could imagine a world where for users
Speaker 1: that are underage, given the sense of the nature of that,
Speaker 1: you would still want to escalate hume review to like
Speaker 1: take final action, but at least the flag that this
Speaker 1: content is something worth investigating. We believe that should be
Speaker 1: status quo for every platform out there. This technology exists.
Speaker 1: The technology exists, but is TikTok using it. I'm aware
Speaker 1: that TikTok actually met with both Hive and Yote throughout
Speaker 1: two thousand and twenty one to try and understand how
Speaker 1: their technology works and if there could be a potential
Speaker 1: partnership there. TikTok ultimately decided not to deploy this technology
Speaker 1: and not to partner with those companies. So I went
Speaker 1: to TikTok's communications team and asked them specifically, why did
Speaker 1: the company decide not to partner with these third party
Speaker 1: age estimation software providers. I knew that TikTok had met
Speaker 1: with representatives from both Hive and Yote throughout two thousand
Speaker 1: and twenty one, and that the company had decided not
Speaker 1: to deploy this technology, but I didn't know why they
Speaker 1: declined to comment on that particular question. I did talk
Speaker 1: to a number of people who worked inside the trust
Speaker 1: and safety space at TikTok to try and figure it out,
Speaker 1: and I was told that the company was afraid of
Speaker 1: the public relations backlash or the reputational risk of collecting
Speaker 1: biometric data of children when there were so many suspicions
Speaker 1: and fears around TikTok and its parent company, Bite Dance,
Speaker 1: which is based in Beijing, spying on children or taking
Speaker 1: data from places like the US and the UK and
Speaker 1: giving it to the Chinese government. So the company was
Speaker 1: afraid that there'd be an additional pr backlash around suspicions
Speaker 1: of China spying on child users around the world. It's
Speaker 1: important to take a moment here to spell out the
Speaker 1: difference between the age prediction software that Hive makes and
Speaker 1: facial recognition software, because it sounds like they do the
Speaker 1: same thing. Facial recognition software tries to figure out the
Speaker 1: identity of a person. That's why it raises all kinds
Speaker 1: of privacy concerns. Age prediction software only tries to determine
Speaker 1: how old and an anonymous person is. It doesn't collect
Speaker 1: any data or try to find out who that person is.
Speaker 1: It turns out they are related, but they're by no
Speaker 1: means at all the same. And of course in the
Speaker 1: database that we even trained on, there's no identities. We
Speaker 1: don't know their names. Those pictures could have been taking
Speaker 1: who knows when, many years ago, you know. So it's
Speaker 1: nothing to do with real time identity tracking. Every new
Speaker 1: image or video that comes to us. It's like we're
Speaker 1: starting over from scratch and we're just making a guess
Speaker 1: as to how old we think that person is. So
Speaker 1: content moderation isn't effective. Age prediction technology isn't always being used,
Speaker 1: and that means kids younger than thirteen are coming into
Speaker 1: contact with all kinds of risky challenges, including the blackout challenge. Now,
Speaker 1: most adults might see it is common sense not to
Speaker 1: copy a video where someone is choking or hitting his
Speaker 1: head on pavement or lighting things on fire, but the
Speaker 1: brain of a child processes those videos differently and referred
Speaker 1: to it as a three part recipe. UM in the
Speaker 1: digital world. That's Dr Adam Pletter. He's a child psychologist
Speaker 1: whose work focuses on how kids use social media. If
Speaker 1: we talk about children or adolescents, what we're talking about
Speaker 1: is the prefrontal cortex, the front part of your brain.
Speaker 1: That's the control center. It controls emotions, it helps all
Speaker 1: those executive functions that people often talk about prioritizing, sequencing,
Speaker 1: and so that part of the brain, the front part
Speaker 1: of your brain, develops all through childhood into adolescents. So
Speaker 1: that's the braking system of the brain, the emotional part
Speaker 1: of the brain. UM more of the middle part, more
Speaker 1: primitive structures in the brain, are you know, really overactive
Speaker 1: in childhood, which again if you think about you know,
Speaker 1: if you go out to a playground or you know,
Speaker 1: see a bunch of children playing, it's a lot more active.
Speaker 1: And then the third part of the recipe is the now,
Speaker 1: the digital world and the amazing emotional often content on
Speaker 1: demand in often in their pockets, you know, two three
Speaker 1: clicks away at their fingertips literally, So if you put
Speaker 1: all those three together, a weak breaking system, an overactive
Speaker 1: emotional part of your brain that wants, you know, that's
Speaker 1: encouraging you to go out and seek out information, and
Speaker 1: then the digital world that is so focused and targeted
Speaker 1: on pulling for our emotions, it really creates, you know,
Speaker 1: a real struggle. To say the least. We'll hear more
Speaker 1: from Dr Pletter a bit later. The struggle he's talking
Speaker 1: about is one that's playing out across the globe. In
Speaker 1: August of this year, two children in the UK died
Speaker 1: allegedly participating in the Blackout challenge. Ariani's family, along with
Speaker 1: two others, have launched a lawsuit against TikTok, claiming wrongful death.
Speaker 1: The case is led by the Social Media Victims Law
Speaker 1: Center based out of Seattle. I went out to Seattle
Speaker 1: and meet with Matthew Bergman. He founded the Social Media
Speaker 1: Victim's Law CINA and is actually the lead attorney on
Speaker 1: the Ariani a Royo case. It's clear that this is
Speaker 1: an epidemic, and it's equally clear that this is not
Speaker 1: a coincidence, and it's not an accident, but rather a
Speaker 1: clear result from the design decisions that TikTok made when
Speaker 1: they set up their algorithms. And that's why we're bringing
Speaker 1: these case. Is I asked Olivia what tech talk says
Speaker 1: about the lawsuit and about the problem of children and
Speaker 1: its platform. TikTok says that it cannot comment on pending litigation,
Speaker 1: which is what most companies say when they've head lawsuits
Speaker 1: filed against them. It does say that the blackout challenge
Speaker 1: predates the platform, that it's been around for decades before
Speaker 1: TikTok was even created, and that's all true. It also
Speaker 1: says that the blackout challenge has never been a trend
Speaker 1: on the platform, that they've never found evidence of the
Speaker 1: blackout challenge actually trending will going viral on TikTok. The
Speaker 1: company says that it does everything it can to remove
Speaker 1: content linked to the blackout challenge, that it's against its
Speaker 1: community guidelines to post harmful content that glorifies or promotes
Speaker 1: dangerous behavior like the blackout challenge. They're not seeing how
Speaker 1: there are algorithms lead to these challenges and not seeing
Speaker 1: how the addictive nature of their product lead to these outcomes,
Speaker 1: and this is why we need them to be held
Speaker 1: account of all in a court of law. The lawyers
Speaker 1: from the Social Media Victims Law Center want to hold
Speaker 1: these companies liable when things go wrong, and that was
Speaker 1: one of the challenges of reporting this is how do
Speaker 1: you prove that the child died because they saw a
Speaker 1: video on TikTok. To prove which social media platform sent
Speaker 1: that content to that child is incredibly difficult. You need
Speaker 1: to do a forensic analysis of their cell phone. You
Speaker 1: need to find when that specific piece of content was
Speaker 1: sent through to the child, where did they watch it,
Speaker 1: when did they watch it, and how do you know
Speaker 1: that when they died. What they were trying to do
Speaker 1: was emulate that challenge. Even when the evidence may seem
Speaker 1: cut and dried, the law may not be on the
Speaker 1: side of parents. There was a case of a ten
Speaker 1: year old girl in Pennsylvania who died allegedly participating in
Speaker 1: the Blackout challenge. She accidentally hanged herself with the purse
Speaker 1: strap in her mother's ward robe. In that case, her
Speaker 1: lawyers say that police did a forensic analysis of her
Speaker 1: cell phone and that there is evidence that TikTok's algorithm
Speaker 1: sent her a video showing her how to hang herself
Speaker 1: with the purse strap of a handbag. TikTok filed a
Speaker 1: motion to dismiss this case, arguing that it couldn't be
Speaker 1: held liable for her death because under the Communications Decency Act,
Speaker 1: platforms cannot be held liable for the content that is
Speaker 1: posted on their sites by third parties. It is an immunity.
Speaker 1: It is a shield for technology platforms from being held
Speaker 1: responsible when things like this happen. A judge in that
Speaker 1: case actually dismissed the lawsuit, saying even if TikTok had
Speaker 1: sent the blackout challenge content, it could not be sued
Speaker 1: because Section two thirty of the Communications Decency Act shielded
Speaker 1: it from being held liable. This problem exists across social
Speaker 1: media platforms. We've seen challenges like the blackout Challenge on
Speaker 1: you for example. I've also seen reports that it's been
Speaker 1: on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. What makes TikTok different, though, is
Speaker 1: that this is a highly performative app, where in order
Speaker 1: to gain followers and build your presence on the app,
Speaker 1: you're encouraged to do extreme things. The algorithm really rewards
Speaker 1: extreme behavior. Thanks to Olivia Carville for sharing her reporting.
Speaker 1: You can read Olivia Carville's Business Week story about TikTok
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg dot com. When we come back, what parents
Speaker 1: can do to protect their kids? Obviously this is pretty
Speaker 1: difficult to listen to. And if you're a parent of
Speaker 1: young kids or even a teenager, you might be one
Speaker 1: during how you're supposed to protect them from seeing or
Speaker 1: possibly copying challenges like these. Doctor Platter, who you heard
Speaker 1: a little earlier, specializes in helping parents talk to kids
Speaker 1: about social media, so I asked him what advice he
Speaker 1: would give, so finding ways of connecting around the concerns
Speaker 1: without overdoing it, helping the children think things through, having
Speaker 1: a plan of how they're going to handle certain things.
Speaker 1: So much of the concerns on TikTok and and other
Speaker 1: places are predictable, so I try to come at it
Speaker 1: less reactive. You want to start off with understanding that
Speaker 1: these concerns are there, and having some plan, whether it's
Speaker 1: written down media plan, where here are some rules. Having
Speaker 1: basic parental controls. I usually lean on the ones that
Speaker 1: are built into the phones. Um not that any of
Speaker 1: the parental control systems are perfect, and you can't just
Speaker 1: sort of set it and forget it, but it serves
Speaker 1: once it's set up, it does serve a good role.
Speaker 1: The prince controls that is in encouraging I'll say, if
Speaker 1: not forcing the dialogue, family sharing. That's something that you
Speaker 1: want to do when you're first setting up the phone,
Speaker 1: but you can do it at any point where each phone,
Speaker 1: the young child's phone, even a young young kid has
Speaker 1: their own Apple I D And this way it's all
Speaker 1: under the same umbrella. If you go under settings, you
Speaker 1: just click on your name and you basically it says
Speaker 1: like set up your family sharing and so that's all
Speaker 1: through the iPhone set up. And then once you have
Speaker 1: that set up, you set up screen time. Uh, if
Speaker 1: you want WiFi controls. Most of the larger internet connections,
Speaker 1: they have their own apps now, whether it's ex Affinity,
Speaker 1: Verizon or whatever the company is that you use for
Speaker 1: your at home WiFi. And I also recommend that setting
Speaker 1: that up separately because then you could turn other devices
Speaker 1: chromebooks off, Xboxes during the school day, during study hours,
Speaker 1: you can easily just toggle things on and off, which
Speaker 1: again forces the dialogue. If your child wants to play Xbox,
Speaker 1: they can come say hey, can I play Xbox? And
Speaker 1: you say, sure, what are you playing? Who are you
Speaker 1: playing with? How long do you think you're gonna play?
Speaker 1: There a little bit of that dialogue back and forth,
Speaker 1: and then you take out your phone. It's all remote
Speaker 1: and you turn it on and then when they're done,
Speaker 1: you turn it off. Do the things you're describing here,
Speaker 1: uh work practically. UM, have you seen that this is
Speaker 1: an effective way for parents to keep their kids safe
Speaker 1: while not turning their kids away from them? So I
Speaker 1: want to say yes because this is what I do.
Speaker 1: You know, typically parents, UM, providing supervision and providing a
Speaker 1: regulatory system, one that is uh that progresses and evolves
Speaker 1: over time works. So it's not just that parental reaction
Speaker 1: to rain things in protect your kid by simply turning
Speaker 1: it off saying no, you're not allowed to have it,
Speaker 1: but doing it in conjunction with talking to the kid
Speaker 1: about why, so that they are kind of part of
Speaker 1: a conversation, you know, the counter of what you just suggest.
Speaker 1: It is not possible, especially coming out of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: But I would have said this if we spoke about
Speaker 1: this five years ago, but especially now, screens are everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's for education, it's for work. You know, every aspect
Speaker 1: of that young child's life is connected in some way
Speaker 1: to some digital format. Some of the kids who are
Speaker 1: engaging in the Blackout Challenge and other things like that
Speaker 1: are much younger. They're ten years old. So they're not
Speaker 1: even teenagers yet. How do you talk to those kids?
Speaker 1: How do you protect those kids who don't even have
Speaker 1: the sophistication of a young teen when it comes to
Speaker 1: understanding what's dangerous and what's not. So I'd be talking
Speaker 1: to the parents more than the kids when you get
Speaker 1: below ten, and then the parents um having to up
Speaker 1: that dialogue with their younger kids. But that is the
Speaker 1: path for the parent to be talking and knowing that
Speaker 1: all of these dangerous things are out there, not to
Speaker 1: just be freaked out, but to use that as motivation,
Speaker 1: protective anxiety, parental anxiety, to talk and to make sure
Speaker 1: that some of these safeguards are in place where you know,
Speaker 1: if you have a nine year old, you know, and
Speaker 1: they're on TikTok, there has to be an awareness from
Speaker 1: my point of view, that that nine year old might
Speaker 1: come in contact with not only strangers reaching out, but
Speaker 1: also some of these challenges that everyone else is doing,
Speaker 1: so it can pull them in in very, very scary,
Speaker 1: dangerous ways. Social media is changing so quickly. There's always
Speaker 1: new sights, and the ones that were all familiar with
Speaker 1: suddenly are kind of less attractive to kids, and they're
Speaker 1: going to something else. That's always been the case with everything. Um,
Speaker 1: how should parents keep up? Because they're often the last
Speaker 1: to know, you know, by the time all the kids
Speaker 1: are on TikTok, they're just kind of first hearing about it.
Speaker 1: And that's a little bit by design, because kids don't
Speaker 1: want to be on the same platforms as their parents
Speaker 1: a lot of the time. How do you even keep up?
Speaker 1: As someone who makes it a practice to keep up?
Speaker 1: So part of my secret is that I work and
Speaker 1: talk to kids and teenagers all day long, so I'm
Speaker 1: hearing that firsthand. UM, I hear from my own kids.
Speaker 1: I've got two teenagers at home, so I try my best.
Speaker 1: There's some great websites out there that do some of
Speaker 1: the work for you. Common sense media comes to mind
Speaker 1: is probably my go to, UM if I have a
Speaker 1: question or just to kind of see what's on their
Speaker 1: front page. And then you know, for ironically, if a
Speaker 1: parent is on you know, one of the social media apps,
Speaker 1: whether it's Instagram or Facebook, there's tons and tons of
Speaker 1: Facebook groups you know, focused on parental controls or often
Speaker 1: run by a certain parental control software. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just for that software. UM, And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of forums out there where people are talking, and
Speaker 1: sometimes you can get pretty anxious reading some of the stuff.
Speaker 1: But as long as you go in with the right
Speaker 1: mindset that you're looking to educate yourself and not just
Speaker 1: be freaked out, it should serve that purpose. Dr Adam Platter,
Speaker 1: thanks for speaking with me. Thank you, thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast
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