It is believed what is called ‘the Choking Game’, where participants seek a high which comes from reducing oxygen flow to the brain, resulted in the death of a Wellington teenager in 2020.
Others, such as the Blackout Challenge and Tide Pod Challenge, which involves ingesting laundry detergent, have struck fear into the hearts of parents worldwide.
While the Choking Game long precedes social media itself, a plethora of instructional videos on asphyxiation are now only a few clicks away.
New research shows the reasons for partaking in risky challenges are complex, and the role social media platforms play in promoting such content is largely absent from media coverage and public discussion.
Dr Victoria Nazari’s PhD research, completed through Massey University, has examined how different groups perceive risky social media challenges and how these perceptions impact participants.
Nazari made a point of interviewing the participants of risky social media challenges, whose voices are often neglected.
“Despite the widespread media attention given to challenges like the Tide Pod Challenge or the Cinnamon Challenge, academic studies were scarce,” Nazari tells EducationHQ.
“Media outlets and health professionals were the primary voices discussing the issue, despite voicing a lack of understanding.
“The participants or online viewers were rarely heard, and this gap in research inspired my study to explore different perspectives.”
While media coverage typically paints participants as uninformed adolescents, Nazari says the age range is actually rather wide.
“It’s children, through to even older adults, just depending on the type of challenge that’s happening,” she says.
“In my study though, what I saw was that news reports and academic material tend to position participants as largely being youth.
“Although adult engagement was noted, it was quite marginalised by the overwhelming disproportionate focus on youth.”
Nazari also discovered there were two schools of thought around why people might take part in a social media challenge.
One of these, stems from the non-participants.
What we saw from that perspective, those constructions, was internet fame,” the researcher says.
“Largely people thought you’d be taking part so that you can get some sort of follower or higher social status through likes and subscribes.
“And part of that was also getting validation,” she adds.
Age restrictions to shield young people from harmful content have been largely ineffective, because people can simply enter a false birth date, or create another account to meet the age requirement.
Peer pressure and neurobiology of the developing teenage brain were also offered as explanations by this group.
But through self-disclosure comments from participants, Nazari learned the motivations for participation are more complex.
“So … they talked about some of the [reasons] mentioned, things like getting views or becoming popular, but then there were elements of engaging for competition and also using risky social media challenges as forms of coping, or comfort seeking,” she says.
Investigating the Blue Whale Game, which involves a number of challenges which involve self-harm, the final task being suicide, Nazari found participants were using the game to reduce emotional pressure.
“Sometimes by talking about it online they would get sympathy and compassion from other users,” she explains.
“And then finally, some people were saying they’d partake, not by choice, but they were almost victims of assault.
“Sometimes it would be used as a form of bullying, but called a prank, so that’s another way of framing social media challenges that are harmful.
“So two groups, and the reasons are quite complex, it’s definitely not just one or the other.”
Through her research, Nazari also noticed a tendency to shift responsibility towards individual participants with the systematic problems behind the dissemination of risky challenge content being largely ignored.
The current narrative we put out there, she says, individualises blame and responsibility towards participants or parents, promoting a culture of blame and hate.
“I saw that clearly in this study, there was so much hostility towards participants who were called dumb, or were described as ‘deserving to die’,” she reveals.
“It’s promoting that individualism, despite social media challenges being a social phenomena, it’s about more than just the participant.”
Nazari points out that social media platforms are designed to facilitate the rapid spread of content without much oversight.
“They use incentives to get people to partake, so things like ‘likes’ on Instagram or ‘loves’, or people being able to subscribe or follow.
“It draws on elements of gamification, where content creators are rewarded with social recognition and even sometimes money.”
The ‘shock factor’ or ‘entertainment factor’, she says, can also promote these dangerous challenges.
In spite of this, although social media platforms were named as needing to stop risky social media engagement, they were not the primary group.
“Primarily blame and responsibility to stop risky social media challenges was placed on parents of participants or the participants themselves ... it was about shifting blame to more personal failings rather than the larger structural forces involved.”
Some attempts have been made in the past, Nazari says, to shield young people from harmful content, such as age restrictions, or the prohibition of harmful content.
However, these have fallen short of the mark.
“So, age restrictions was where social media platforms were almost trying to respond to users, given the risks and how big this got in the media...” Nazari says.
“[But] it’s largely ineffective, because people can just enter a false birth date, or create another account to meet the age requirement.
“And even if content’s restricted, you can still look at the comment section and find different ways to evade the restrictions, or find different links to the video.”
As for community guidelines banning harmful content, Nazari calls this merely an illusion of intervention.
“What happens is that they don’t regulate this, it’s actually falling back onto the community to report things, so that responsibility is shifted.
“I guess my positioning is that social media challenges are a social phenomena, there’s multiple stakeholders and they’ve all got different interests.
“So accountability should be shared, it’s not just one group, but social media platforms are definitely part of this.”
