Last night, Virginian voters approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s Congressional maps to favor Democrats. While the result was a win for the Democratic Party, the new map won’t go into immediate effect as the state Supreme Court is currently considering its legality. 

Judy Rogg had waited years for this moment. In late February, a YouTube executive took the stand in a landmark social media addiction trial in Los Angeles—the first to test whether tech companies could be held liable for the design and operation of their platforms resulting in psychological harm to children.

For parents who have lost children to accidental deaths or suicides they say were caused or facilitated by social media, it was a watershed moment, and an emotional one. How would leaders of the world’s most powerful social media companies answer claims that they knew the risks, but targeted young people anyway?

Rogg, now in her 70s, was a little older than the other parents who were a fixture at the trial. She wore a large pin with the image of her son, Erik: freckled, forever 12, his bright blue eyes echoing his mother’s. She lost him in 2010 after he tried a “choking game” challenge, also known as a “blackout challenge,” in which kids attempt to get a brief high by hyperventilating or using ligatures to cut off oxygen until they pass out.

Such games predate the internet, but algorithms and mimetic posting on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok have exponentially amplified their reach, globalizing what was once a localized adolescent dare.

Both companies prohibit dangerous challenges and have become more proactive about removing them, and both use AI to detect and remove underage accounts. Executives have said for years that they can’t find evidence of choking challenges, even suggesting many viral trends are in fact “hoaxes” fueled by media and moral panics.

And yet, kids keep dying after seeing these videos on their apps.

As she watched an attorney for the plaintiff in the Los Angeles trial grill Cristos Goodrow, YouTube’s vice president of engineering, on Feb. 23, Rogg said she felt vindicated by internal documents that painted a damning picture of the company’s approach to safety.  And by a timeline that coincided with her own research about the circulation of choking game videos on YouTube.

During a break, she walked out of the courtroom to find a message on her phone: A family friend of another potential choking game victim, this time a 15-year-old boy, had just reached out.

“My heart stops, and my stomach falls out, because sadly, it’s the same,” Rogg told The Epoch Times.

That family has not gone public yet—sometimes it takes parents years to speak about their experience, and most asphyxiation game deaths are mischaracterized as suicides, according to Rogg, who keeps an informal tally through her advocacy organization, Erik’s Cause.

“It’s so outrageous that you just can’t even fathom it, and you kind of put your hands over your eyes metaphorically because you just can’t look at it. Whereas with suicide, generally speaking, there are signs,” she said.

Since 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced, Rogg counts some 741 deaths, the vast majority of them boys in the United States.

As the trial got underway in Los Angeles on Feb. 9, parents in Stephenville, Texas, around 1,300 miles away, were mourning the sudden loss of their 9-year-old girl.

On Feb. 3, Curtis and Wendi Blackwell found their daughter, JackLynn, unconscious in their backyard, a cord wrapped around her neck. After watching videos on YouTube, they told the media that she tried the “blackout challenge.”

Like “Kaley G.M.,” the 20-year-old plaintiff in the Los Angeles trial, JackLynn was on YouTube young and often. Users under 13 are not allowed to register for a YouTube “main” account; they are instead diverted to a restricted version. But anyone can watch without an account—or, like Kaley did, simply enter a random birth date.

“She was on YouTube a lot, which, of course, a lot of kids are,” Curtis Blackwell told a CBS reporter in a tearful television interview in March.

Media outlets reported JackLynn would be added to 82 documented cases of “choking challenge” deaths. But those numbers are wildly outdated; they come from an analysis the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted on possible cases from 1995 to 2007, and national reporting has not been updated since.

Many risky challenges appeared to peak during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and choking game fatalities have since decreased significantly, according to Rogg’s count. But their popularity tends to be cyclical in nature, resurfacing suddenly and then subsiding again.

Spurred by an insatiable drive for virality, an age-old fascination with asphyxiation can take new shapes as social media evolves.

Earlier this month, videos of the popular Gen-Z influencer Clavicular getting choked out, losing consciousness, and convulsing during a livestream went, in his words, “giga viral”—in turn spawning endless commentary and iterative videos, spreading across YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms.

Researchers have been warning about the blackout challenge on YouTube at least since 2009. Parents claim dangerous content still circulates, despite moderation—or because of it, served to children unsolicited by exploitative algorithms.

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—Beige Luciano-Adams

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