Maxvorstadt: Pouring boiling water over other people is a crime, we call it "Körperverletzung" in Germany. Sorry, don`t know the right english word for that.

DadJoke007: How I love the German language and the ability to put thousands of long words together so that they form one enormous super word. It's very painting.

I think the English term for körperverletzung would be aggravated assault though. :)

firstpastthepost: Aren’t a lot of these things mostly one offs that are spun into “trends” among children by parents on social media whipping each other into a frenzy? Every time I see something like this I have to question how common it actually is. It reminds me of the rainbow parties parents freaked out about or kids licking frogs. They’re basically contemporary urban legends that circulate among parents who aren’t capable of talking to or monitoring their kids.

A couple of dumb kids doing something isn’t a trend.

Bigs: Let it run and enjoy Darwinism at work

dgnfly: This generation the darwin's law is in full swing, Let's hope it keeps momentum cause the world is already full of stupid people anyway... so a few less shouldn't matter all that much

sanscript: Problem is, Darwin's Law of evolution by natural selection does not apply to humans, at all.

Tauto: Posting, crap like this is only advertising it more and it's hardly the stuff that...Gog or anyone else needs to see and TBH is worse than political discussions and they are banned.

PaterAlf: Aren't you a little late to the party? Most news about this topic are from 2017 and summer 2018. And probably it wasn't really a big thing, but just some stupid people and clickbait media blowing the "trend" completely out of proportion.

I work with kids for 20 years now and I've never heard anyone even talk about hot water challenge.

NuffCatnip: I have an idea for a few new challenges, first off the 'let's put all these degenerates into jail' challenge, followed by the 'throw the keys away' challenge. Problem solved ;)
On a more serious note, this was done by a few dozen people probably, not thousands. Media is blowing this out of proportion, as they always do.

DivisionByZero.620: IMO, the proliferation of social media is perhaps one of the most stupidest trends to come out of the 2010's. This just proves my point.

Dangerous "challenges" could be stopped quickly and easily with a bit of machine-learning/AI. However, the major anti-social media networks refuse to implement what would be a simple auto-blocking of dangerous and stupid challenges, simply because every view earns them ad revenue.

So unfortunately, the antisocial media won't change their ways because it would cut into their profit and it's up to the government to do something about it. Here's my recommendation:

Require all social media networks to use machine-learning/AI-powered tools that are readily available to automatically flag posts containing the text pattern "[Possibly dangerous behavior or item] challenge" (or anything ending in "challenge"). Use text-adjacency or typo-correction heuristics (readily available on smartphones) to detect use of deliberate misspellings, alt-codes (accents), chatspeak, or leetspeek (for example: "B0i1ing/H0t water challenge" or "Boilling/Hott Watr chalenge" instead of "Boiling/Hot Water challenge" in a futile effort to avoid being automatically flagged.

Flagged posts would be queued for moderator review. If a "challenge" post is found "likely to cause harm or injury that could require intervention by emergency services", the post would be marked as harmful (hiding it from anyone under 18) and the name of the challenge added to a blacklist.

The machine-learning/AI framework will aggressively scan posts for anything that looks like a blacklisted challenge. First-time offenders caught posting an obviously harmful or dangerous challenge would receive a warning and have their social media profiles flagged as harmful for a set period of time, which hides all their posts and content from users under 18. Further posting of harmful challenges would result in the offending profile being permanently marked as harmful content.

To prevent users from trolling the system by falsely labeling regular (non-harmful) posts with a known harmful challenge name (this would get the posts falsely flagged for moderator review, effectively wasting the moderation team's time), each user will be entitled to 1 moderator review per 24-hour period. This means that if you tag or title all of your posts as "Boiling Water Challenge" even when none of them are related to the actual challenge, only your first post for each day will be queued for moderator review, and the remainder will simply be dropped or hidden by the automated system with no manual review.

An automated system like this would be incredibly easy and cheap (by social-media giant standards) to build, and cheap to maintain. There is no reason (other than pure corporate greed) why this system shouldn't be in place.

DadJoke007: How I love the German language and the ability to put thousands of long words together so that they form one enormous super word. It's very painting.

I think the English term for körperverletzung would be aggravated assault though. :)