5 of the most dangerous social media trends

Internet challenges seem to crop up every so often, with people uploading their attempts onto various social media platforms and fanning the flames of the trend until it seems like everyone is doing it.

Some are harmless (the mannequin challenge), some hope to raise awareness for good causes (the ice bucket challenge), but a lot of them tend to have a more dangerous twist to them.

The Tide Pod challenge is arguably one of the most famous (and dangerous) internet trends. Starting in late December 2017, viral jokes started circulating on Twitter about eating Tide Pods, which eventually evolved into challenging people to intentionally bite into the laundry detergent packet on camera. This led to several hospitalizations for poisoning, but seemingly did not deter the internet from continuing the trend. Eventually Tide had to issue PSAs against eating their products, and YouTube started taking down videos of the challenge from its site.

The boiled water challenge posed the same question as the Tide Pod challenge: How far would you go to go viral? This challenge involved people either throwing boiling water on each other or chugging boiling water themselves, both of which can causes severe burns and even resulted in some deaths.

But not all bad internet trends seem dangerous at first. The Kylie Jenner lip challenge — inspired by Kardashian fans noticing the youngest sibling's new, larger lips — asked people to film themselves suctioning their lips in shot glasses. While definitely not as deadly as the Tide Pod or boiled water challenges, people ended up rupturing the blood vessels around their mouth, or getting cut by the glass shattering from the pressure.

The In The Know video above discusses more dangerous social media trends — but be warned, there are some visuals that might be disturbing for some viewers.