Thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teens while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety.
In separate lawsuits, a bipartisan group of attorneys general cited internal company documents to paint a picture of a multibillion dollar company that knowingly contributed to a mental health crisis among American teenagers to maximize its advertising revenue. They said that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has relentlessly designed features to prompt heavy, compulsive use of TikTok and that many children were using the app late at night when they would otherwise have been asleep.
TikTok “knew the harms to children,” Rob Bonta, the Democratic attorney general of California, said in an interview. “They chose addiction and more use and more eyeballs and more mental and physical harm for our young people in order to get profits — it’s really that simple.”
The lawsuits add to a rapidly expanding list of challenges for TikTok in the United States, which now counts 170 million monthly U.S. users. A federal law passed in April calls for the app to be banned in the United States as of January unless it is sold. A federal lawsuit against the company in August also claimed that TikTok allowed children to open accounts, gathered information about them and made it difficult for their parents to delete the accounts.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The states, many of which started investigating the company’s harms to minors in early 2022, are generally claiming that TikTok’s conduct violates their consumer protection laws. The states say that TikTok plays videos in a manner that aims to make young users lose track of time and sends them round-the-clock notifications and ephemeral content like livestreams to compel them to keep checking in. The longer users stay on the app, the more targeted ads TikTok is able to show them.
The attorneys general say that TikTok has misled users about its so-called 60-minute screen time limits for young people and other features that promise to curate the videos that they see.
The states have also taken umbrage with beauty filters on TikTok — technology that alters the faces of users — saying that they are especially problematic for young women. New York’s lawsuit cited a study saying that 50 percent of girls believe they do not look good without editing. “TikTok is well aware that its beauty filter features lead to unhealthy, negative mental and physical disorders” but chooses to keep them on the platform anyway, the state said.
The action is similar to a set of lawsuits that states brought against Meta in the last year, which accused the company of unfairly hooking teenagers and children to Instagram and Facebook while publicly downplaying the hazards of the sites.
In the federal lawsuit from August, the Justice Department said that the app’s policies involving children under the age of 13 violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and a 2019 agreement, in which TikTok promised the government it would tell parents if it planned to collect information from children.
Major portions of the lawsuits filed Tuesday were redacted, because they contained internal information from TikTok, similar to early filings out of lawsuits involving Meta. The attorneys general said they were working to make that information public in the coming months.
But a similar lawsuit, filed by Nebraska’s attorney general in May, offers some insight into the company’s behavior with respect to minors. Parts of the state’s argument that had originally been redacted were made public in August.
TikTok employees acknowledged that its algorithm had a “‘slot machine’s effect’ on young people, according to Nebraska’s filing. Other documents, the state said, showed that TikTok internally referred to American teens as a “golden audience,” noting “the younger the user, the better the performance,” referring to their engagement with the app.
Brian Schwalb, the Democratic attorney general of the District of Columbia, compared social media to the television in a family’s home. Parents could set a plan to control their child’s television consumption — but that wasn’t true with TikTok and other social media platforms, he said.
“The challenge with social media is that parents aren’t getting the straight scoop from TikTok to begin with,” Mr. Schwalb said. “There isn’t transparency about how to protect their children.”
Mr. Bonta of California said that TikTok could easily make the app safer for young people, pointing to the operations of Douyin, ByteDance’s version of TikTok in China. Douyin restricts nighttime usage for young people and places 40-minute time limits on its youngest users, among other features, Mr. Bonta said.
The state lawsuits is likely to follow the company even if ByteDance sells it to a new owner, Mr. Schwalb said. Federal law requires such a sale by January, though TikTok has challenged that law as unconstitutional. A panel of judges in Washington will make a decision in the case by Dec. 6, at which point the Supreme Court may take it up.
“Unless, and until, the business models change, it’s going to be important for me, and I think for my colleagues in other states, to hold TikTok accountable, whoever its owner might be,” Mr. Schwalb said.
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