This year, six people in New York City have died after "subway surfing," a new social media challenge

By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

(CNN) — A 13-year-old girl has become the latest person to lose her life in New York City while “subway surfing,” a dangerous challenge that attracts young people to social media.

‘Subway surfing’ involves riding on top of a subway car while it is moving.

Yes, while it moves.

This precarious trend, which has existed for years, has regained popularity on social platforms, encouraging users to replicate videos announcing this trend despite the risky (and illegal) activities that sometimes have fatal consequences.

There have been six subway surfing fatalities and 181 related arrests recorded this year through Oct. 27, New York police told CNN on Tuesday. Both numbers are up from last year’s five fatalities and 118 arrests, which could trigger a reckless endangerment charge, the department said.

Although it was not immediately clear why they did it, the 13-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl ran on top of moving train cars in Queens, New York, on Sunday. Both lost their balance, with the 13-year-old dying after falling between moving cars, a law enforcement source told CNN. The 12-year-old suffered head injuries and bleeding on the brain, the CNN affiliate reported WABC reported.

Days earlierA boy who had just turned thirteen was killed while surfing on the subway in Queens, while another subway surfer “narrowly avoided tragedy after hitting his head in the Bronx,” the NYPD Chief of Transit said on X. The 13 year old died while participating in a social media challenge, his mother told WPIXadding that he had posted previous videos on social media of himself doing the stunt, and she had warned him not to ride on top of trains.

“This dangerous, exciting behavior has life-changing consequences. It is not worth your life or the pain you would cause your family and friends,” the New York Police Department said in the X-post before concluding with a slogan created as part of a campaign launched last year to discourage surfing in the subway:

“Subway surfing kills! Drive in, stay alive.”

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has worked with social media sites, including YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, to remove footage of subway surfing to discourage the practice. More than 10,000 messages have been deleted. told CNN affiliate WABC in September.

And Meta, Google and TikTok have made space on their platforms to help amplify this a new citywide messaging campaignthe city said on Thursday in a press release.

Yet there are fourteen attorneys general in the United States sued TikTok last month partly due to the spread of dangerous viral challenges, and some families of teenagers killed while surfing subways have also sued social platforms.

Social media has indeed “completely changed in so many different ways” as the conventional adolescent dares, said Dr. Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and an associate professor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

“Your communities are becoming potentially huge,” she told CNN, “and it seems like everyone you choose to follow, or even choose not to follow, becomes part of that peer pressure, that outside influence of the people you want. to be a part of or that you want to impress or get the attention of and be socially recognized (by) in some way.”

The NYPD also uses drone technology to help arrest subway surfers based on 911 calls from concerned citizens — and deterring potential offenders — although the agency does not prioritize arrests, it told CNN. Instead, police are trying to show drone-captured videos to young people’s parents in an attempt to convince them to stop subway surfing.

In one video Police have posted, people stand and walk on top of moving subway trains as strong winds batter them. Some lie on their stomachs, others squeeze between train carriages. Later, plainclothes police officers waiting in train cars arrest the subway surfers as they enter, the video shows.

While it is unclear how fast these specific cars were traveling, the average New York City subway can travel as fast as 50 miles per hour, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told CNN.

“Once a subway surfer is found, a field team will stop the train at the next station and remove it,” the city said Thursday, noting that the effort “helped rescue” 114 people between the ages of 9 and 33 — including an average of 14 years old.

Internet challenges are nothing new

New York Mayor Eric Adams was “heartbroken to learn that subway surfing — and pursuit of social media influence — stole another life,” he wrote Monday on X in response to the death of the most recent teenager in Queens. “We are doing everything we can to raise awareness against this dangerous trend, but we need all New Yorkers – and our social media companies – to do their part, too.”

“No post is worth your future,” he added.

Social media challenges have been attracting enthusiastic scrollers for years. They have included awareness campaigns such as the ALS ice bucket challenge and more choreographed, light-hearted ones like the Mannequin Challenge.

But sometimes the concept was dangerous and resulted in injuries, as with the Milk Crate Challenge And Tide Pod Challengeand even ended in death, as in the Benadryl Challenge and subway surfing.

On Instagram and Facebook, subway surfing videos may violate policies on coordinating harm and promoting crime, owner Meta told CNN, declining to comment on the latest death Adams posted about. The Platforms remove content that depicts, promotes, advocates or encourages participation in high-risk viral challenges, except where this raises awareness or condemns them; those messages are labeled as sensitive, Meta said.

TikTok previously worked with New York authorities to remove subway browsing content, according to the New York Times reported in January. TikTok And Googling/YouTube have policies that prohibit content that encourages or could facilitate dangerous challenges; those platforms, plus Reddit and

Yet a combination of social pressure and attention-seeking behavior fuels these challenges, as likes, comments or shares fuel a certain trend, says Saltz, the psychiatrist who hosts the podcast, “How Can I Help?”

It’s “cognitive behavioral positive reinforcement,” she explained. “It’s like giving a dog a treat… and then they want to repeat that behavior because it makes them feel good, it gives them a dopamine rush.”

And that in itself can become addictive for those who thrive on taking risks, Saltz said.

Parents should have question-based conversations with young people about what they find intriguing — or don’t find — about these challenges, she said, and arm them “with some real-world data about why certain things are dangerous and not worth it and other ways where their children might be able to achieve or get the things they are looking for, or be heard in what they think they are missing.”

Lawsuits allege TikTok encourages dangerous behavior among young people

Especially “TikTok Challenges” are highlighted in lawsuits filed last month against the popular short video platform and its owner, ByteDance, by a bipartisan effort group of fourteen attorneys general from across the United States, led by Letitia James of New York and Rob Bonta of California, both Democrats.

The lawsuits allege, among other things, that “TikTok challenges” can encourage dangerous behavior among young users.

“We strongly disagree with these claims, many of which we believe are inaccurate and misleading,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement in response to the attorney general’s legal action. “We are proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we have done to protect teens and we will continue to update and improve our product. We provide robust security measures, proactively remove suspected underage users and have voluntarily launched safety features.”

Meanwhile, the mother of a teen who died while surfing the subway last year — and whose death is cited in James’ lawsuit against TikTok — has filed a lawsuit partly the social media companies on whose platforms her lawsuit alleges he viewed images of the unsafe practice.

In February 2023, 15-year-old Zackery Nazario was subway surfing a Brooklyn-bound train on the Williamsburg Bridge, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center, which is representing his mother against TikTok, ByteDance and Meta.

Norma Nazario indicted the platforms on the anniversary of Zackery’s death, claiming the companies are responsible for exposing her son to subway browsing content, the company said. The teenager had climbed to the top of a train and hit his head on a steel beam, causing him to fall onto live electrical lines before being run over by another carriage, the center said.

TikTok and Meta declined to comment on active lawsuits.

“Our attack is not the fact that the platforms allow subway surfing material to be uploaded to their platforms,” Nazario family attorney and founder Matthew Bergman told CNN on Wednesday. “Our attack is that their platforms are unreasonably dangerous because they are directing children to this material that they are not looking for (and) making money from it.”

CNN’s Brynn Gingras and Carolyn Sung contributed to this report.