In a statement posted to social media on Friday, Roome said: “We now have to wait for the judge to decide whether the case is dismissed or whether we are allowed to proceed to the discovery stage.
“For the court, this is about motions and procedures. For us, it is about our children. Our dead children.”
The case, filed by the Social Media Victims Law Centre in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware, alleges Jools, Isaac Kenevan, 13, Archie Battersbee, 12, Noah Gibson, 11 and Maia Walsh, 13, died while attempting an online challenge.
It claims the children’s deaths were “the foreseeable result of ByteDance’s engineered addiction-by-design and programming decisions”, which were “aimed at pushing children into maximising their engagement with TikTok by any means necessary”.