Remember when you were younger and your parents used to ask you, "If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you do it?" The question was meant to feel dumb about not properly exercising your free-will. Turns out, the youth is still in need of this valuable lesson, especially with the advent of TikTok. The video-sharing app largely thrives off short clips of people participating in viral trends, also known as challenges. While a TikTok challenge could be as simple as imitating some dance moves to a particular song, sometimes they challenge your physical capabilities to a greater extent. For example, can two people kick your legs from beneath you while you're mid-air without seriously injuring yourself? This brilliant idea is fittingly referred to as the #SkullBreakerChallenge.
The person who has their legs kicked isn't actually supposed to know what's coming for them. The goal of the challenge is for two people to humiliate a third person by flipping them with this trick. It's done by the two people convincing the third that they will all jump at the same time for some irrelevant reason. Once the middle person is in the air, the two terrible friends on the edges kick the floating limbs to send the victim into a painful fall.
As you could imagine, this trick could result in injuries so bad that it may not be worth however many views the TikTok manages to rack up. This possibility has already became a devastating reality. After two 13-year-olds in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, performed the #SkullBreakerChallenge on their unsuspecting classmate, the victim sustained a head injury and concussion that led to a seizure. The child’s parents, Marc and Stacy Shenker, told CBS News they received a call that their son had been injured and arrived at the school 20 minutes later to find him “laying down non-responsive.” The two seventh-grade culprits have been arrested and charged with third-degree aggravated assault and third-degree endangering an injured victim.
Out of fear that these sorts of horrific outcomes will continue, TikTok has released a statement regarding this challenge and other similarly-dangerous ones: "We do not allow content that encourages or replicates dangerous challenges that might lead to injury. In fact, it's a violation of our community guidelines and we will continue to remove this type of content from our platform... Nobody wants their friends or family to get hurt filming a video or trying a stunt. It's not funny—and since we remove that sort of content, it certainly won't make you TikTok famous.”