Social media and harmful user-generated content: a responsibility that can no longer be ignored

It may not sound surprising, but once again European institutions have proven to move far slower than technological development and the social consequences it entails. The EU has, in fact, only recently (in 2019) tackled the issue of copyright on the internet and social media – and with the bland instrument of a Directive instead of the more binding Regulation, that will allow member states to have quite a large discretional margin in deciding how to apply it in their own national legislation. The European privacy regulation, GDPR, was also issued only in 2016.

But copyright- and privacy-related issues are not the only threats of the digital era: the popular video-sharing platform TikTok is currently under the spotlight (again) after the tragic death of an Italian 10-year-old girl, who passed away on January 21st after taking part in the so-called Blackout Challenge on this medium, which dares participants to choke themselves until they lose consciousness.

It is not the first time dangerous challenges appear on this platform, which is mostly used by extremely young users – 32,5% of TikTok users in the U.S. are aged 10-19, according to data published by Statista in June 2020. In the early months of 2020, several reports were issued about injuries related to the #skullbreakerchallenge which had become popular on the platform, which involved two people kicking the legs from under a third, making them fall over. US prosecutors have charged two youngsters with aggravated assault over the prank and warned parents to stop their children taking part. A TikTok spokesperson said they would remove this content from the platform and reminded the public that “content that encourages or replicates dangerous stunts and/or risky behaviour that could lead to injury or death” is a violation of their community guidelines and will therefore be removed. Other dangerous challenges included the “penny challenge”, the “concussion challenge”, the “cereal challenge” and the “bright eye challenge”, in which users poured a mixture of bleach, hand sanitizer, jelly and shaving cream on their eyeballs in an attempt to change their eye colour, causing obvious damage.

Removal of potentially harmful content by the platform, however, heavily relies on users reporting videos they believe to be inappropriate; furthermore, we all know how Community Guidelines of social media are often circumvented. TikTok, for example, theoretically allows registration only for users aged at least 13. But it is too easy for kids to get around this limitation, and although some say that parents are expected to monitor their children in their use of digital media, it is nowadays completely unrealistic to think that such supervision could be effective and thorough enough.

Following the death of the 10-year-old girl, the Italian data protection agency imposed an immediate limitation on the data processing performed by TikTok with regard to the accounts of users whose age could not be verified with certainty. It seems a bit too late, and we can not help but wonder why an issue like this has not been already dealt with by the European authorities, to guarantee an effective and uniform protection of users, especially children, in the whole of the EU.

So not only did the EU arrive years too late with (bland) guidelines about copyright protection online, allowing the rights of content creators and editors to be exploited for years with the silent complicity of platforms and tech giants; we now must witness teens and children getting harmed after seeing viral content on social media, the consumption of which has further increased with Covid-19 restrictions on real-life interactions, before our institutions take any effective measure to fight these dangerous phenomena.

When will European and national political and regulatory bodies learn to keep up with digital advancements and provide – and enforce! – effective legislation to hold platforms accountable for the dangerous user-generated content they host and profit on?