Dangerous online challenges are being taken to the extremes putting people’s lives in danger.

These trends should be shut down.

One of the most recent trends is to take 15-20 Benadryl pills at once. On apps, such as TikTok, there’s a hashtag called “Benadryl Challenge.” Most of the hashtags are people who have done the challenged, overdosed and still promote it. The challenge wasn’t taken seriously until a 15-year-old girl overdosed and died by the challenge. TikTok hasn’t spoken about the incident but has taken down the hashtag. These hashtags needed to be taken down before it blew up.

In early 2018, the trend of eating laundry pods for bragging rights blew up. Aside from this challenge being extremely toxic, in the first 15 days of the “Tide Pod Challenge” the poison control center received 39 calls about laundry pods– the same number they received in all of the year prior.

Some dangerous challenges of 2020 include the “Cha-Cha Slide Challenge” as seen on TikTok, where teen drivers take a video of themselves “slide to the left, slide to the right,” on active roads while DJ Caper’s song ‘Cha-Cha Slide,’ plays in the background. This challenge promotes reckless driving and has resulted in cars almost getting flipped over. Another challenge is the “Skull-Breaker Challenge” which involves three people.  The person in the middle jumps, thinking that the other two will jump as well, but instead, the two kick inward knocking the middle person’s feet forward. This challenge has resulted in injuries and concussions.

The list of absurd challenges go on and on. A lot of these online challenges are promoting self-harm, smoking and drug use. YouTube and social media apps need to be on the look out for the dangerous challenge trends and take them down before they blow up in popularity, or at the very least add trigger warnings. These challenges are really dangerous and are taken to the extremes taking people’s lives from them.