Do you remember these deadly internet trends?
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00:00The dawn of the internet age and the ability to share videos quickly and conveniently on social media has been one of the most fundamental societal shifts since the turn of the millennium.
00:11It has reformatted our online world and made it easy for challenges and trends to quickly go viral and spread like wildfire.
00:19But while most of these are harmless, like the ice bucket challenge you might remember from a few years ago, sometimes they can take a tragic turn.
00:27I am tech writer Matt Monaghan and these are the internet trends that turned deadly.
00:33Happy slapping was one of the very early internet challenges to go viral on the nascent world wide web.
00:40It started in about 2005 in the United Kingdom but quickly spread to other parts of Europe, in particular France.
00:47It saw people filming themselves and their friends randomly attacking slapping strangers in public, but it soon turned deadly.
00:55A man in Yorkshire died after his spleen was ruptured in one such attack, while in another incident in 2008 a girl fell to her death while trying to escape from a happy slapping.
01:07Taking us into the late 2000s and early 2010s was the internet craze of blanking.
01:13If you're of a certain age you probably remember your social media feed being awash with videos of this kind and you may have even found yourself partaking.
01:23But for those who are unaware, blanking was a craze that involved filming yourself lying down in unusual places.
01:32The street, the road, your drive, your kitchen floor, you name it.
01:38But unfortunately, like other trends on this video, it was one that turned deadly.
01:43A man in Brisbane fell to his death from the 7th floor of a hotel in the city in Australia when he was trying to plank on the balcony and lost his balance.
01:53Now for a trend that's maybe a bit less familiar to those of us outside of the United States, the one chip challenge.
02:00It is based around eating a really really spicy crisp from the brand Paki and it's seasoned with the Carolina Reaper which is one of the hottest chillies in the world.
02:11The aim is to film yourself eating the crisp and then not eat anything or drink anything afterwards for as long as possible.
02:19But it has been tragically discontinued after a 14 year old boy in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts died while attempting it.
02:30And finally we turn our attention to swatting, which is less an internet challenge and more a trend on the darker side of the web and a deadly harassment tactic.
02:41Swatting refers to when a person makes a fake call to emergency services causing heavily armed officers to descend on an address.
02:50In 2017 a man was shot by police in Wichita in a swatting incident which was sparked over an argument about a bet on Call of Duty World at War.
03:01While in 2020 a 60 year old man in Tennessee died from a heart attack after police responded to a false report of a woman being killed in his home.
03:12It was all organised in an attempt to get him to give up a handle on Twitter.