{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://raskin.house.gov/2023/9/rep-raskin-urges-social-media-companies-wmata-to-address-dangerous-subway-surfing-social-media-trend-following-loss-of-local-teen", "Rep. Raskin Urges Social Media Companies, WMATA to Address Dangerous \u201cSubway Surfing\u201d Social Media Trend Following Loss of Local Teen", "2023-09-08", "2023", "2023-09", "Democrat", "House", "MD", "Jamie Raskin", "R000606", "raskin.house.gov", "raskin", "https://raskin.house.gov/press-releases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, DC \u2013 Today, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) wrote letters to social media companies Meta and TikTok and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) about a dangerous social media trend, known as \u201csubway surfing,\u201d which recently claimed the life of a young person in his district. \u201cSubway surfers,\u201d who are often teenagers influenced by coaxing and sinister validation from an online community, film themselves climbing and then riding outside or on top of a moving subway car.\n\n\u201cThis online trend has deadly consequences,\u201d wrote Rep. Raskin to Meta and TikTok. \u201cThis summer, my constituent, Jay Thirunarayanapuram, lost his life five days after his fifteenth birthday while subway surfing. His loving parents and friends are devastated, and our world is poorer for our loss of a bright young artist, animal lover and extraordinary young man.\u201d\n\nAlthough Meta and TikTok policies restrict content containing \u201canything unlawful\u201d or \u201cpromoting dangerous activities and challenges\u2026that may lead to significant physical harm,\u201d respectively, and should thus both prohibit subway surfing videos, some content persists. Diligent content monitoring and strong, ongoing enforcement of platform guidelines can prevent the proliferation of subway surfing videos and deter impressionable young people from this dangerous activity. Rep. Raskin also wrote to WMATA to convey his alarm about this social media trend and to request that WMATA share any further steps the authority is considering to reduce and deter this practice.\n\nThough the subway surfing trend appears to be less pronounced in the National Capital region, recent media reports have documented an alarming rise in these dangerous incidents on the East Coast, with New York City recording 928 incidents in 2023 and four deaths in the first six months of this year.\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T18:35:26Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://raskin.house.gov/2023/9/rep-raskin-urges-social-media-companies-wmata-to-address-dangerous-subway-surfing-social-media-trend-following-loss-of-local-teen"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 3.270224202424288, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}