They mostly weren't eating them, just making staged videos of themselves doing something dumb the way teenagers have ever since they got access to cameras. The problem is that biting into one and spitting it out again can be enough to kill you as laundry detergent can corrode your tongue and throat in seconds and it's very easy to inhale liquid throat. The media reported it as teens eating tide pods, which made staging fake eating tide pod videos using a real tide pod as a prop seem like a fun idea for even more teenagers. If the media had been a little more responsible, then they could have got the message across that something more dangerous than it seemed was dangerous instead of telling people something obviously dangerous that hadn't happened was dangerous.