By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

(CNN)— A 13-year-old girl is the latest person to lose her life in New York City while “subway surfing,” a dangerous challenge that attracts young people on social media.

“Subway surfing” involves riding on top of a subway car while it is in motion.

Yes, while moving.

The precarious trend, which has been around for years, has once again gained popularity on social platforms, encouraging users to replicate videos advertising it, despite the sometimes fatal consequences of the risky and illegal activity.

There have been six subway navigation deaths and 181 related arrests this year as of October 27, the New York Police Department told CNN on Tuesday. Both numbers are surpassing last year’s five deaths and 118 arrests, which could lead to a reckless endangerment charge, the department said.

While it was not immediately clear why they did it, a 13-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl ran over moving train cars on Sunday in Queens, New York. Both lost their balance and the 13-year-old boy died after falling between moving cars, a law enforcement source told CNN. The 12-year-old boy suffered a head injury and bled on the brain, CNN affiliate. WABC reported.

days beforeA boy who had just turned 13 died while surfing on the Queens subway, while another subway surfer “narrowly escaped tragedy after hitting his head in the Bronx,” said the The NYPD traffic chief said in X. The 13 year old boy deceased while participating in a social media challenge, his mother he told WPIXadding that he had posted previous videos of himself doing the trick on social media and that she had warned him not to ride on top of trains.

“This dangerous thrill-seeking behavior has life-altering consequences. “It is not worth your life or the heartbreak you would cause your family and friends,” the NYPD said in Post X before concluding with a slogan coined as part of a campaign launched last year to try to discourage subway surfing:

“Subway surfing kills! Travel inward, stay alive.”

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has worked with social media sites such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram to remove images showing subway surfing to discourage the practice, with more than 10,000 posts removed, the agency said. he told CNN affiliate WABC in September.

And Meta, Google and TikTok have made space on their platforms to help amplify a new citywide messaging campaignthe city said Thursday in a press release.

Still, 14 attorneys general from across the United States last month he sued TikTok in part due to the proliferation of dangerous viral challenges, and some families of teenagers killed while riding subway cars have also sued social platforms.

In fact, social media has “completely changed in many different ways” the conventional teen challenge, said Dr. Gail Saltz, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and associate psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

“Your communities become potentially huge,” he told CNN, “and it seems like everyone you choose to follow, or even not follow, becomes part of that peer pressure, that outside influence from the people you love. to be part or that you want to impress or that you want to attract attention and be recognized socially in some way.”

He The NYPD is also using drone technology to help stop subway boaters based on 911 calls of concerned citizens – and deter potential criminals – although the agency does not prioritize arrests, he told CNN. Rather, police are trying to show drone videos to parents of young people in an effort to get them to stop surfing the subway.

in one video Police stations, people stand and walk on moving subway cars as strong winds buffet them. Some lie face down and others huddle between the train cars. Later, plainclothes police officers waiting inside the train cars stopped the subway users as they entered, as the video shows.

Although it’s unclear how fast those particular cars were moving, the average subway train in New York City can travel at up to 50 mph, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told CNN.

“Once a subway surfer is found, a field team will stop the train at the next station and remove them,” the city said Thursday, noting that the effort has “helped save” 114 people, including 9 and 33 years old, with an average of 14 years.

Internet challenges are nothing new

New York Mayor Eric Adams He was “heartbroken to hear that subway surfing (and the pursuit of social media clout) has robbed him of another life,” he wrote on Monday. in X in response to the most recent teen death in Queens. “We’re doing everything we can to raise awareness against this dangerous trend, but we need all New Yorkers (and our social media companies) to do their part, too.”

“No position is worth your future,” he added.

Social media challenges have for years attracted enthusiastic users. They have included awareness campaigns such as ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and others that are more choreographed and happy like the Mannequin Challenge.

But sometimes, the concept has been dangerous and resulted in injuries, as in the case of the Milk crate challenge and Tide Pod Challengeand even ended in death, as happened with the Benadryl Challenge and surfing on the subway.

On Instagram and Facebook, subway surfing videos may violate the Crime Promotion and Damage Coordination policy, owner Meta told CNN, although he declined to comment on the latest death Adams posted about. Platforms remove content that depicts, promotes, advocates, or encourages participation in high-risk viral challenges, except when it raises awareness of or condemns them; those posts are labeled sensitive, Meta said.

TikTok previously cooperated with New York authorities to remove surfing content on the subway, The New York Times reported in January. tiktok and Google/YouTube have policies that prohibit content that encourages or may facilitate dangerous challenges; Those platforms, plus Reddit and X, have not responded to CNN’s questions about how they handle potentially dangerous challenging content on their platforms and Adams’ call for them to “do their part.”

Still, a combination of social pressure and attention-seeking behavior fuels these challenges as likes, comments or shares accumulate into a particular trend, said Saltz, the psychiatrist who hosts the podcast ” How can I help?”

It’s “positive cognitive behavioral reinforcement,” he explained. “It’s like giving a dog a treat… and then they want to repeat that behavior, because it made them feel good, it gave them a dopamine rush.”

And that in itself can become addictive for those who thrive on taking risks, Saltz said.

Parents should have question-based conversations with young people about what they find – or don’t find – intriguing about these challenges, he said, and arm them “with some real-life statistics about why certain things are dangerous and not worth it.” and other ways that your children could perhaps achieve or obtain the things they are looking for or be heard in what they feel they are missing.”

Lawsuits Allege TikTok Encourages Dangerous Behavior Among Youth

“TikTok challenges” in particular are highlighted in lawsuits filed last month against the popular short video platform and its owner, ByteDance, by a bipartisan party group of 14 attorneys general from across the United States, co-led by Letitia James of New York and Rob Bonta of California, both Democrats.

The lawsuits allege, among other impacts, that “TikTok challenges” can encourage dangerous behavior among young users.

“We strongly disagree with these claims, many of which we believe are inaccurate and misleading,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement in response to the attorneys general’s legal actions. “We are proud and remain deeply committed to the work we have done to protect teens and will continue to update and improve our product. “We provide strong security measures, proactively remove suspicious underage users, and have voluntarily released security features.”

Meanwhile, the mother of a teenager who died subway surfing last year, and whose death is cited in James’ lawsuit against TikTok, has demanded in part, the social media companies on whose platforms he claims he saw images of the unsafe practice.

In February 2023, 15-year-old Zackery Nazario was riding the subway on a Brooklyn-bound train over the Williamsburg Bridge, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center, which is representing his mother against TikTok, ByteDance and Meta.

Norma Nazario defendant platforms on the anniversary of Zackery’s death, alleging that the companies are responsible for exposing his son to subway browsing content, the firm said. The teenager had climbed to the top of a train and hit his head on a steel beam, causing him to fall onto live power lines before being run over by another car, the center said.

TikTok and Meta declined to comment on active litigation.

“Our attack is not the fact that the platforms allow subway navigation material to be uploaded to their platforms,” Nazario family attorney and firm founder Matthew Bergman told CNN on Wednesday. “Our attack is that their platforms are unreasonably dangerous because they direct kids to this material that they’re not looking for (and) monetize it.”

CNN’s Brynn Gingras and Carolyn Sung contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
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