TikTok has been accused of being a breeding ground for dumb and dangerous stunts, ranging from the “Kool-Aid man challenge” to the more recent #dropthingsonmyfoot game.
Recently, UK teen Lucas Howson sustained a brain injury and nearly bit his tongue after partaking in the potentially fatal “tap out” challenge that allegedly proliferated on TikTok.
“He wasn’t making any sense,” the boy’s mother, Amy Howson, told Kennedy News while recounting the distressing incident. “He kept repeating himself. He didn’t know where he was.”
The mother-of-three had reportedly gotten a call on the evening of July 17th informing her that her son had passed out in the park while hanging out with friends.
“I got a phone call from my sister who’s the same age as Luca and she said that Luca had been in a fight,” the Lincolnshire resident recalled. “They’re very close. She said Lucas is on the floor, unconscious and he’s all cut up.”
Alarmed, the distraught parent hopped in her car to drive to the park. On the way, she received a call from a woman who was with Lucas and said he’d bitten through his tongue.
When Amy arrived at the park, her son was crying and had blood all over his face and down the front of his shirt.
“I was shaking, asking what had happened,” recalled the Brit, who said her son was unfortunately too “confused” to give her a coherent answer.
“He kept asking what had happened,” she said. “There was no normal conversation. He kept forgetting that I had told him what happened.”
The mother subsequently asked passersby, who informed her that Lucas had been held in a chokehold as part of a social media trend. Before he could submit, he went unconscious and fell to the ground from a standing height, hitting his chin and biting off most of his tongue.
Her son had been participating in the “tap out” challenge, a variant of the various blackout challenges in which a participant is held in a chokehold until they nearly pass out.
Allegedly popularized on TikTok and other platforms, the dangerous game made headlines in 2023 after a Scottish teen, Hamdan Khaliq, died in a chokehold — even though authorities don’t believe his death was a result of said stunt.
All told, Lucas was reportedly unconscious for 20 seconds before he came to. “His friends were all absolutely distraught,” said his mom. “Luckily there were some first-aiders there.”
She subsequently rushed her pride and joy to the hospital, where doctors confirmed that he suffered from amnesia due to the oxygen-depriving challenge and had bitten through three-quarters of his tongue.
Thankfully, Lucas has since made a full recovery, but the ordeal left a bad taste in his mother’s mouth.
“He said, ‘We always do it’. He said everyone’s doing it around school,” she said. “They’d been play-fighting, taking turns to get each other in headlocks.”
“I told him that could’ve been fatal,” said Amy, who suspected that her son had seen the trend “on social media.”
In light of her child’s near-death experience, Amy is pushing for better monitoring of social media so children aren’t exposed to these hazardous stunts.
“These videos should definitely be reviewed,” she said. “Don’t try them. I know when you’re a kid you think you’re invincible.”
According to TikTok, the app prohibits content that displays or promotes dangerous behavior and they’re constantly monitoring the platform to preemptively identify and remove videos that violate their policies.
TikTok claimed that of the problematic clips that they culled between January and March 2025, 99.8% were removed proactively and 97.5% were removed within 24 hours.
