Annie McGrath never had to worry too much about her 13-year-old son Griffin. He had good grades and lots of friends.
Griffin played baseball and the drums and had even won a national science competition. Because he was so interested in science and experiments, he spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos. That's where he and his friends saw something called the blackout challenge.
"We had heard of challenges," said McGrath, who lives in Madison, Wis. "But I never knew there were any that were deadly."
Social media challenges involve people recording themselves doing something dramatic, funny or risky. The videos often go viral. Some of these dares, however, can be dangerous. Like the blackout challenge, which is when someone holds their breath until they pass out.
That's what happened to Griffin one night in February 2018. He did the blackout challenge from his room, while FaceTiming with friends. Only he never woke up.
"I didn't know anything was wrong until it was too late," McGrath said, in an exclusive interview with NPR, ahead of a speech she's planning for Friday.
Griffin is one of an estimated 1,385 children known to have died from the blackout challenge, according to a nonprofit called Erik's Cause, which was founded by Judy Rogg, whose son also died from a choking game.
"That's just the tip of the iceberg," McGrath said. "The only ones we know of are the people that go to the news or find each other."
YouTube spokesperson Brittany Stagnaro told NPR that the company's policy is to remove videos that involve challenges with asphyxiation or choking. But, McGrath said she sees such videos and reports them daily. Often they're not taken down. She said some videos have remained on the site for years.
Pressuring those with a financial stake: shareholders
McGrath, along with an advocacy group called Parents Together, is now pressuring the people who have a financial stake in YouTube to get the company to have more transparency around its protocols for these videos.
On Friday, she's addressing its parent company Alphabet during an annual shareholder meeting. She's urging shareholders to vote for Resolution 15. This resolution proposes a third-party review of Alphabet's Audit Committee, which is tasked with assessing risk to the company, including how YouTube manages videos with harmful content.
In her pre-recorded speech shared with NPR, McGrath says Alphabet's "inaction" on these videos "should give investors pause" and that it demonstrates the company isn't appropriately avoiding legal risk, regulatory risk and human risk.
Glass Lewis, a leading proxy advisor in this space, also backs the resolution. It shared its report with NPR ahead of the vote, which said an independent evaluation of Alphabet's Audit Committee could benefit shareholders.
The giant tech company, however, is recommending investors vote against Resolution 15. In its opposing statement, it said that its Audit Committee has the "requisite experience, skill set, and protocols" to manage risk and that the resolution wouldn't be an "effective use of company resources or result in better direction or performance."
McGrath's speech at the meeting is one of the first times a family member of a victim has told their personal story at a shareholder event, said Zak Rogoff, who studies shareholder resolutions as a research manager for the nonprofit Ranking Digital Rights.
"The thing that's interesting about this is that shareholders have brought somebody who is personally affected by the problems the company is causing," Rogoff said.
He said these resolutions rarely pass because the shareholder voting structure typically gives more weight to votes from people who run the companies. "But if they get a high enough amount of support, sometimes companies will start to budge just out of caution," he added.
By Dara Kerr
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