Though most social media challenges are lighthearted, others have caused serious injuries, poisonings, and even deaths.
Parents have long warned their children about peer pressure. But kids are still vulnerable to taking unnecessary risks because “everyone else is doing it” — and dangerous social media challenges are no exception.
With the rising popularity of several social media platforms in recent years, pressure to participate in social media challenges has become far-reaching and difficult for many kids and teenagers to resist. And while some online dares have been discovered to be pranks, hoaxes, or blown way out of proportion in the news, others are truly as dangerous as they seem.
Blue Whale Challenge
Facebook/GoFundMeFifteen-year-old Isaiah Gonzalez died by suicide because of the Blue Whale Challenge, according to his family.
Believed to have originated in Russia, the Blue Whale Challenge reportedly emerged on numerous social media sites around 2016.
The premise of the game is simple: Search social media sites for a term related to the Blue Whale Challenge. Get connected to a “curator,” who then gives the “player” a series of increasingly dangerous daily tasks, such as carving letters and numbers into their arms. The player sends photographic proof of each completed task to the curator, and then repeats each day.
Until you get to day 50 — when you’re told to commit suicide.
“They start psychologically manipulating you,” said Russian university student Oleg Kapaev, who began playing the game out of boredom, in an interview with Sky News. “It is very professionally done. You become a bit of a zombie.”
Eventually, Kapaev was given his final task: Jump off of a 20-story building in Moscow. “I didn’t feel like I needed to kill myself,” he recalled. “I felt I needed to complete the task. I only had this thought in my head.”
Thankfully, Kapaev’s parents found out about the challenge and intervened before he was able to carry out his final task. But others haven’t been so lucky. According to Sky News, there have been an estimated 130 deaths linked to the Blue Whale Challenge in Russia alone. And by 2017, the game had made it to several other countries, including the United States.
Tragically, 15-year-old Isaiah Gonzalez died by suicide in his home in San Antonio, Texas after playing the Blue Whale Challenge. The teen was found hanging in his closet by his father, and his phone was propped up nearby — apparently broadcasting the entire suicide online. And he wasn’t the only American victim. Another teenager, an unnamed 16-year-old girl from Atlanta, Georgia, also committed suicide in 2017 after playing the game.
Instagram responded to the tragic news by creating a message for users who search for terms related to the Blue Whale Challenge: “Can we help? If you’re going through a difficult time and want support, we’d like to help.” The message includes a link to helpline numbers and suicide prevention tips.
Tide Pod Challenge
ABC 13Videos of people biting into Tide Pods went viral on social media platforms around 2018.
One of the most well-known — and frequently mocked — social media challenges has been the Tide Pod Challenge.
It is unclear exactly how the challenge began, but many attribute it to a satirical article about the laundry detergent pouches that was published by The Onion in 2015: “So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods.” Soon afterward, jokes about eating Tide Pods showed up in internet memes. But some people took the joke too far.
According to The Washington Post, at least 220 teens consumed Tide Pods in 2017, which led to frantic calls to U.S. poison control centers. And the American Association of Poison Control Centers found that 25 percent of those cases were intentional. In just the first half of the first month of 2018, there were already nearly 40 cases — half of which were intentional.
Many experts blamed the Tide Pod Challenge, which involved teens biting into Tide Pods, filming their reactions on camera, and posting it on social media. “This is what started out as a joke on the internet and now it’s just gone too far,” said Ann Marie Buerkle, the chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission at the time, in an interview with CBS News.
Even those participating in the social media challenge recognized that it was a poor decision to make. “A lot of people were just saying how stupid I was or how — why would I be willing to do that,” said 19-year-old Marc Pagan, who admitted that he did it on a dare from his friends. “No one should be putting anything like that in their mouths, you know?”
But despite the many poisoning cases that occurred from this challenge, it’s worth noting that no teenager has died because of it. However, at least 10 young children and senior citizens have died after ingesting Tide Pods, a sobering reminder of how poisonous these detergent pouches are.
While the actual occurrences of people eating Tide Pods was far lower than it seemed, the national outcry from concerned parents and organizations led Tide to release a statement warning customers on Twitter about the dangers of eating the pouches: “What should Tide PODs be used for? DOING LAUNDRY. Nothing else. Eating a Tide POD is a BAD IDEA.”
