Social media is an almost universal feature of young American life. 95% of U.S. teens aged between 13 and 17 say they use at least one social media platform, with YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram especially popular.
Young adults (aged 18 to 29) use social media almost as much, with a majority admitting to daily platform engagement.
A key feature of social media use among these age groups is dangerous viral challenges that encourage or normalize risky behaviors, including the ingestion of substances, physically extreme and dangerous stunts, and exposure to fire. According to an extensive peer-reviewed analysis, 89% of articles featured evidence of injuries linked to dangerous social media challenges.
This study will consider the places where most injuries from social media challenges occur, their main causes, the type of injuries involved, and who’s suffering the worst of the injury count, and other social media downsides.
Let’s first consider which social media platforms are most popular among the age groups in question.
The Main Social Media Platforms Used By Teens and Young Adults
TikTok leads U.S. social platforms when it comes to daily engagement. According to 2025 study data, its users spend on average 52 minutes per day on the app.
YouTube (48 minutes per day) is the next most used platform, while Instagram (35 minutes), Snapchat, and Facebook (both 30 minutes) are extremely popular.
Both adolescents (13-17 year-olds) and young adults (18-29 year-olds) spend significant amounts of their time on various popular social media platforms.
YouTube is the most popular platform among 13-29-year-old social media users. 90% of teens and 95% of young adults use the platform, underlining its role as a primary source of video content for both age groups.
TikTok is also consistently popular among the same age groups, with 63% of both teens and young adults regularly using the platform. This suggests that such short-form, trend-driven video content maintains a steady audience that continues consistent interest across the two demographic groups.
Instagram becomes increasingly popular as users grow older, rising from 61% take-up among teens to 80% among young adults, indicating a nascent shift toward platforms centered on social identity, networking, and visual self-presentation.
Snapchat usage remains relatively stable across both age groups: the platform is used by 55% of teens and 58% of young adults, reflecting its continued appeal for private or peer-focused communication.
Facebook is subject to the biggest age-based difference. Usage of the platform more than doubles across age groups, from 32% among teens to 68% among young adults. This exemplifies how platform preferences can quickly evolve even while overall social media engagement remains high.
Collectively, these patterns confirm that engagement with major social platforms evolves rather than diminishes once teenagers become adults. In both cases, social media is a perpetually used resource.
Social media challenges are a big part of contemporary social media engagement. And many of those viral challenges involve significant danger, with many leading to serious adverse outcomes.
Social Media Challenge Permutations
Viral challenge content often involves the recreation of various trending stunts for online recognition. While some social media challenges are harmless, many can lead to injuries and, in extreme cases, even death.
A close examination of documented injury outcomes linked to high-risk social media challenges emphasizes the real-world consequences of trend-driven online behavior.
A key example is the Blackout or Choking Challenge, which involves the intentional restriction of a participant’s oxygen supply and which has caused brain damage, unconsciousness, vascular neck injuries, and death. In fact, the challenge has been linked with more than 100 fatalities, although experts suggest the true number may be higher due to underreporting and misclassification.
Ingestion-based challenges can also lead to severe medical consequences, particularly for younger participants.
Between 2016 and 2020, the Tide Pod Challenge led to more than 35,000 emergency room visits among individuals under 18, many of whom had either been poisoned (71.3%) or contracted dermatitis (72.2%). Notably, over one in ten cases required hospitalization, reflecting the severity of chemical exposure and bodily harm.
Similarly, the Benadryl Challenge has been linked to seizures, comas, cardiac complications, respiratory distress, and fatalities, with antihistamine overdoses known to cause dangerous heart rhythm disturbances and impaired breathing.
Physical stunt challenges represent a different kind of harm but carry comparable levels of risk.
The Milk Crate Challenge led to at least 8,107 hospital-treated injuries between 2020 and 2021, mainly due to falls. Injuries ranged from bruises and sprains to fractures, concussions, spinal trauma, paralysis, and even death: more than a third of cases involved falls from precariously placed milk crates with additional injuries accrued by participants who tripped over them.
The Fire Challenge represents one of the most extreme examples of escalating risk, with participants sustaining injuries ranging from superficial burns to second- and third-degree burns, respiratory injury, infections, and permanent scars. In some documented cases, burn injuries from this challenge affected as much as 45–50% of total body surface area, requiring extensive medical intervention.
Collectively, these findings demonstrate that while social media challenges vary in form, they frequently result in injuries severe enough to lead to emergency medical care, hospitalization, long-term treatment, permanent disability, or even death. This makes it clear that social media challenges are a consistent and measurable public health issue as opposed to a series of isolated incidents.
And in terms of the injuries accrued by participants, very specific sites are usually involved.
Typical Social Media Challenge Injury Locations
Study data indicates that injuries associated with social media challenges predominantly occur in a limited number of specific physical settings, largely due to the type of challenge or activity involved.
Private residences are the primary setting for ingestion–related and fire–based challenges, with poison control data suggesting that over 90% of poisonous exposure takes place in the home.
This means households are the most common site for injuries linked to challenges involving medications, household chemicals, or flammable substances.
Outdoor public and natural environments account for a substantial share of physically dangerous incidents, particularly regarding stunt-based content and risky selfies.
And data shows that selfie-related injuries and deaths usually occur outdoors, primarily near bodies of water, cliffs, or precarious scenic locations, where there’s a serious risk of a fall or drowning.
Community and mixed settings, such as residential neighborhoods and public spaces, frequently feature in large-scale stunts such as the Milk Crate Challenge.
Roads represent another critical injury environment. Studies emphasize the distracting danger filming or using social media while driving represents.
These injury site patterns suggest that social media-related injuries are most likely to occur in homes, outdoor public or natural spaces, mixed community settings, and on roads, confirming the key role that offline environments play when it comes to dangerous online trends.
Why Pinpointing Injury Sites Is Important
If we can understand where social media injuries occur, we can provide that data to those looking to prevent injuries and to those we depend upon to provide a crucial response.
Unlike traditional injury risks, social media challenges often unfold in unregulated environments like private homes, unsupervised outdoor areas, or active roads. These are all places where safety measures, adult supervision, and emergency responses may be limited or delayed.
The primary social media challenge injury locations increase the likelihood that injuries will escalate from minor to major medical emergencies. And this in turn amplifies both health risks and the strain on the healthcare system.
When those injury incidents occur, which types lead to the highest number of emergency department visits?
Social Media Use and Emergency Department Visits
2022 emergency department data revealed that a significant number of U.S. teens were treated and released after experiencing serious, preventable injuries. This illustrates the real-world health consequences adolescents face during a typical year of social media engagement.
Drug–related incidents (including poisonings and adverse drug effects) accounted for the largest share of teen emergency visits (nearly 85,000) due to social media challenges gone wrong.
Physical injuries were also a big issue. More than 50,000 teens were treated for fractures, 13,786 for concussions, 7,581 for burns, fire, or corrosion injuries, and over 1,100 required emergency care for suffocation-related incidents.
Although these visits did not require an overnight stay in the hospital, they were serious enough to warrant emergency medical attention. This makes it clear that a significant number of social media challenges represent medical danger that far exceeds harmless bumps and scratches.
These figures take on added significance when we consider the magnitude of teen social media use. In 2022, an estimated 12.04 million teens aged 13–17 were active on Instagram, with 11.9 million active on TikTok. Both platforms feature a lot of widely-shared footage involving risky behaviors, dangerous challenges, and substance-related content.
When we compare emergency department treat-and-release visits to social media user numbers, drug-related harm and serious injuries afflict roughly 1.3% of teen users of Instagram and TikTok. (Equivalent age-specific usage data for teens on YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat was not publicly available.)
This data doesn’t necessarily establish a direct causal link between social media use and emergency department visits. Yet the injury categories in question (drug poisonings, fractures, concussions, burns, and suffocation) closely mirror the types of behaviors frequently associated with widely reported dangerous social media challenges.
These include substance misuse trends, high-impact physical stunts, fire-related dares, and oxygen-depriving behaviors that have prompted warnings from medical professionals and child-safety advocates.
The data highlights how extensive teen participation in social media coincided with a high number of emergency room visits for injuries commonly linked to high-risk behaviors. This reinforces the importance of awareness, prevention efforts, and built-in platform safeguards that can reduce social media harm among adolescents.
And it’s not just a matter of physical health – mental health is also a huge issue when it comes to social media.
The Mental Health Toll of Social Media
Emerging research and expert reports suggest that engagement with dangerous social media challenges and harmful content may be linked to measurable mental health risks among adolescents and young adults, particularly when those challenges promote self-harm, risky behaviors, or distressing content.
Studies of youth mental health report that 32% of U.S. adolescents aged 12–17 say social media makes them feel worse about themselves.
Additionally, 46% say it negatively affects their body image. This suggests that emotionally charged content (including risky trends) can cause psychological distress.
Research also finds that children and adolescents who use social media more than three hours a day face double their risk of mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression. This suggests that deeper engagement, including watching or participating in social media challenges, can amplify harmful emotional effects.
More than 1 in 10 adolescents (11%) exhibit problematic social media behavior. This pattern is linked to lower overall well-being and comparatively high levels of substance use and stress, factors often synonymous with risky online interactions.
Clinical research further shows that 40% of depressed and suicidal youths report problematic social media use. This is defined as distress or dependency related to platform use associated with increased symptoms of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.
Although large-scale causal data on specific challenge participation is still limited, mental health professionals have raised concerns that continuous exposure to harmful or provocative online content (including self-harm, extreme behaviors, or perilous stunts framed as challenges) can cause severe knock-on issues.
They include stress, emotional instability, and maladaptive thought patterns among vulnerable teens, particularly when peer reinforcement and algorithmic amplification intensify exposure.
Summary
As a near-universal among young Americans (95% of U.S. teens aged 13–17 use at least one platform; likewise, 90% of young adults aged 18-29), social media is a constant presence across critical and vulnerable developmental stages.
Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram dominate teen and young adult usage, with usage figures emphasizing how much young users engage with trend-driven content.
Households are the most common site for injuries linked to challenges involving medications, household chemicals, or flammable substances
Research indicates that this level of immersion has raised significant concern among medical researchers. This is particularly true with regards to viral social media challenges that encourage or normalize risky behaviors such as substance ingestion, physical endurance stunts, fire exposure, and restricted breathing.
A large peer-reviewed analysis of social media studies published between 2000 and 2024 found that 89% of social media challenge coverage confirmed participation injuries.
The most common examples included burns, poisonings, lung injuries, and suffocation, clearly establishing widespread challenge-related harm.
Further platform-focused study data shows that exposure doesn’t diminish as teens become young adults, and often grows (as was particularly the case for YouTube and Facebook users).
The dangers of viral challenges (including The Blackout or Choking Challenge, which involves oxygen deprivation, and has been linked to over 100 reported deaths, and the Milk Crate Challenge, which has caused thousands of emergency department–treated injuries and has killed participants) are clear.
Emergency department data from 2022 further underscores the consequences, with nearly 85,000 teens treated for drug-related poisonings and adverse drug effects, and over 50,000 treated for fractures. Additionally, social media challenges are linked to serious mental health issues.
And injury site patterns suggest that social media-related injuries are most likely to occur in homes, outdoor public or natural spaces, mixed community settings, and on roads, confirming the key role that offline environments play when it comes to dangerous online trends.
Appreciation of where the injuries occur should offer valuable information to emergency services and guardians or parents of young participants.
Ultimately, social media challenges represent a serious and measurable public health concern, irrespective of whether they’re carried out at home or in a public space.
The findings in this study reinforce the vital need for clear prevention strategies, awareness efforts (for parents as well as young users), and built-in platform safeguards that limit the measurable and significant harm caused by dangerous social media challenges.
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