A dangerous social media trend is putting lives at risk.
It’s called “chroming” — inhaling chrome-based paints and other toxic substances to get high. The trend made headlines earlier this year when a 13-year-old girl died after inhaling fumes from a deodorant can. Her parents claim she may have gotten the idea from social media.
The act of sniffing toxic substances is nothing new, but Dr. Karen North, founder and former director of the USC Annenberg's Digital Social Media program, says TikTok users are doing it for different reasons than typical inhalant users.
“The difference these days is that on TikTok, which has such a culture of participation … this is one of those that’s not about getting high, it’s about doing something funny for other people to watch,” she said.
North compared chroming to an extension of the more harmless trend of uploading videos of friends or family under sedation after getting their wisdom teeth out. The way people act after chroming can be similarly entertaining, but those behaviors are symptoms of potentially life-threatening chemical exposure.
While kids have challenged each other to do dumb things since the beginning of time, these days, dangerous trends can spread quickly thanks to social media algorithms.
“When somebody does something stupid or funny, but funny in a dangerous way, it doesn’t just go from you to your friends,” North said. “It goes from you to your friends to acquaintances to their friends to their acquaintances, and it does it almost immediately.”
Chroming is just one of several recent TikTok trends that have led to children’s deaths, from the Benadryl challenge to the “blackout challenge.”
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