TikTok, a popular video-sharing app among teenagers, is swamped in bizarre fads and crazes.
Some people, though, have resorted to harmful behavior in their never-ending quest for likes and views. The “Fire Challenge” is the most recent of them.
After reportedly participating in the social media craze, a 13-year-old girl in Oregon wound herself in the ICU with serious burns to her neck and arms.
What is the “Fire Challenge?”
The “Fire Challenge” seems to have originated with Jack Jerry’s account, which depicts the TikTok founder putting hairspray on a mirror, shutting out the lights, and lighting it on fire.
This is clearly incredibly risky and may easily end in tragedy in a restricted environment.
Jerry has created various forms in response to various requests, including a heart on the bathroom mirror.
One of the videos has over 747,800 views and 72,600 likes on YouTube.
Jerry has a large sphere of influence on the app, with 1.8 million followers and a total of 35.9 million likes on his profile.
Related: Talking to Kids About TikTok’s Bathroom Destruction Challenge
What happened to the 13-year-old?
Destiny Crane allegedly attempted the trend, which ended in a bottle of isopropyl alcohol bursting in her face and torso, causing her injuries. She needed a tracheotomy as well as two skin graft procedures.
“There found a capped bottle of alcohol laying on the counter, and the entire side of it had split out, and there was a lighter and a shattered candle,” Andrea told FOX12 Oregon on Monday. So, that’s the type of conclusion we arrived at.”
Her mother, Kimberly Crane, said she was attempting to imitate a video of a guy using hairspray to spark a fire in a mirror.
“It was surreal, sad,” she added. Nobody likes to witness their daughter on fire, for example. It was a nightmare.”
“You’re not just putting yourself at risk; you’re putting your whole family and everybody else in that building in peril,” Portland fireman Rob Garrison told the news site.
“The safety of our community’s younger teens is our top priority, and we want to empower families to have an open dialogue about digital safety—including through our Youth Portal, Guardian’s Guide, and Family Pairing features, which allow parents to set age-appropriate content and screen time limits,” a TikTok spokesperson told Newsweek.
“As we continue to improve our rules, attach warning labels to videos, ban hashtags or reroute searches, and invest extensively in our people and technology to help keep our community safe, we take our responsibilities seriously.”
The “blackout challenge,” which was connected to the death of a 10-year-old girl in Italy in January, is another potentially hazardous craze that has propagated on the site.
Users are encouraged to hold their breath or limit their airflow until they lose consciousness in this challenge.
Related: A Tik Tok Challenge on December 17 Has Massachusetts Police and Schools on Alert
In 2019, the “eye challenge” was criticized for urging TikTok members to put bleach in their eyes.
According to TikTok’s most recent transparency report, which covers the second half of 2020, the company deleted 89,132,938 videos from its platform throughout the globe for breaching its community rules or terms of service.
This represents less than 1% of all videos on the site. There was 11,775,777 video taken down in the United States alone.