Pushing the boundaries of social media.

Milagros Soto was discovered dead by relatives at her home in the Capitán Bermudez, Santa Fe Province of Argentina on January 13, 2023. The 12-year-old was discovered dead from apparent self-asphyxiation from a makeshift noose with family members blaming the young girl’s death on reported bullying that had been occurring at school. 

This tragic event connects to the broader context of this opinion piece. Milagros Soto’s death was an accident, she had been performing a challenge that had recently resurfaced on TikTok called the blackout challenge. She had previously performed this challenge twice successfully unfortunately the third time she attempted to try the challenge resulted in her death. 

The blackout challenge or choking challenge as some call it involves the participant intentionally choking themselves to experience a brief “high.” According to a report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, most deaths associated with the challenge occur when the participant is alone. In the same report, it is reported that eighty-seven percent of the deaths were males with the average age being 13 years old.  

The thesis of what this piece is trying to convey is that society needs to have a more hardline stance on acknowledging what trends and challenges are dangerous to users and finding ways to eliminate their creation on social media platforms.  

We should not advocate for the complete takeover of the internet, nor call for some form of committee or council to oversee what they would consider acceptable content. The opposite side of this, including personal feelings about the subject matter, is that the internet should remain a bastion of free speech and ideas.  

Where the line should be drawn is on platforms that have a high user base and have specific rules or terms of service that outline what the owners of the platform expect out of users who have accounts with them. 

Social media can be a force for positive change if used correctly with users reposting events that may not be reported on by traditional news outlets, creating groups and launching campaigns or protests that can reach a wider audience, and supporting other users who can use their creativity to create art that before would be seen by a select few but can now be shared instantaneously to the rest of the world.  

Having this understanding of the positives that social media can create opens us to the negative side of social media. Not all these social media challenges and trends are cut from the same cloth, some are just harmless pranks or people having fun with each other, on the other side of this we have users who engage in life-threatening challenges or engage in illegal activities. 

Social media is one the most accessed parts of the internet with the number of people who go on these sites numbering worldwide to about 4.76 billion or 59.4 percent. The age demographic that makes up the most usage of social media is 20 to 29-year-olds according to recent research. 

Young people who use social media are at risk of gaining an addiction to whatever platform they use. “Variably rewarding users with stimuli (likes, notifications, comments, etc.) keeps them engaged with the content. When a user’s photo receives a “like,” the same dopamine pathways involved in motivation, reward, and addiction are activated.” Tammy Qiu writes. 

Young people are also facing the full brunt of social media algorithms that continually recommend content that a user responds to the most. This is how social media challenges are spread to many people across social media. 

Common sense should dictate that most of these challenges are either illegal or dangerous, but most users ignore those possibilities to gain the reactions of others online. The causes of this range from fear of missing out (FOMO), the danger is exciting, internet recognition and plain addiction to chasing after the next trend. 

Sometimes it is not even online challenges, social media influencers are a rising trend in today’s world. The problem with influencers is that they are at the mercy of their followers and must continually compete with other influencers for views. Take for example a case that happened this year, Chinese live streamer Tizi uploaded a video to websites like Kuaishou and Douyin (TikTok) where she bought a shark and ate it. 

The problem with this is that the shark was identified as a Great White Shark a protected species in China. Tizi was known to cook and eat other exotic animals with her videos being part of a larger trend in Chinese social media wherein influencers eat exotic animals, a similar case happened in 2021 when another influencer was detained after eating a Tritons Trumpet which is a second-class protected species in China. 

While Tizi was fined 125,000 Yuan ($18,500) and apologized for her actions, this trend reflects how the landscape of social media looks today. Influencers and social media users are in an arms race against each other to out due and outperform each other either for money or the gratification social media provides. What can we do to curb these dangerous behaviors? Many social media platforms like TikTok have taken measures to identify harmful content and work with larger content creators to inform their audiences of the dangers of said content. 

Society needs to take more charge when it comes to social media, parents need to discuss with their children about what to watch out for. Parents also need to adapt to the changing technologies and stay up to date with how the internet and social media use their technology to target specific trends and users. Humanity will continue to grow in population and so will the internet, we need to be ready for the changes that will occur in the years to come and confront them when they appear.