(NewsNation) — A U.S. appeals court Wednesday wrestled with whether social media platform TikTok could be sued for causing a 10-year-old girl’s death by promoting a deadly “blackout challenge” that encouraged people to choke themselves.

Members of a three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted during oral arguments that a key federal law typically shields internet companies like TikTok from lawsuits for content posted by users.

But some judges questioned whether Congress, in adopting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996, could have imagined the growth of platforms like TikTok that do not just host content but recommend it to users using complex algorithms.

“I think we can all probably agree that this technology didn’t exist in the mid-1990s, or didn’t exist as widely deployed as it is now,” U.S. Circuit Judge Paul Matey said.

Tawainna Anderson sued TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance after her daughter Nylah in 2021 attempted the blackout challenge using a purse strap hung in her mother’s closet. She lost consciousness, suffered severe injuries and died five days later.

The blackout challenge led to multiple deaths in Colorado, Massachusetts and Oklahoma.

After the deaths, a group of parents called on TikTok to create “mirror” accounts so parents could see what their kids were watching. Such accounts, they said, could prevent future tragedies.

Anderson sued after her daughter’s death, and her lawyer, Jeffrey Goodman, told the appeals court that while Section 230 provides TikTok some legal protection, it does not bar claims that its product was defective and that its algorithm pushed videos about the blackout challenge to the child.

But TikTok’s lawyer, Andrew Pincus, argued the panel should uphold a lower court judge’s October 2022 ruling that Section 230 barred Anderson’s case.

Pincus warned that to rule against his client would render Section 230’s protections “meaningless” and open the door to lawsuits against search engines and other platforms that use algorithms to curate content for their users.

TikTok has faced scrutiny from Congress, which has urged the creation of better safeguards for children. CEO Shou Chew, in a hearing last year, defended the app’s security and privacy policies and told lawmakers TikTok isn’t an agent of China.

The company has spent more than $1 billion in efforts to convince the U.S. government that the app is safe and separate from the Chinese Communist Party.

Multiple states have moved to ban the social media platform on government-owned devices, and a bevy of lawsuits have been filed against the company. The latest state to sue was Iowa, which argues the social media company mispresents its content.