“Subway surfing kills” public service advertisement in the New York subway on Sunday, February 11, 2024. (Photo by Frances M. Roberts
NY: “Subway surfing kills” public service advertisement in New York
(New York, NY) — A Manhattan judge has cleared the way for a mother to sue TikTok and Instagram after her son died subway surfing. Norma Nazario says the platforms promoted the deadly trend that led to 15-year-old Zackery’s death. Nazario says Tik Tok’s algorithms constantly fed videos of other subway surfing videos into in her son, Zachery’s feed.
Zackery was subway surfing on a Brooklyn-bound J train over the Williamsburg Bridge on February 20th, 2023 when a low beam struck him in the head. After her son’s death, Norma found lots of videos of subway surfing on his social media accounts.
Matthew Bergman is Nazario’s lawyer. He works with the Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents families who are taking on the social media giants. He also believes the algorithms on social media platforms are partially responsible for Zackery’s subway surfing death.
