By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering

TikTok hit by over a dozen state lawsuits for allegedly harming teens

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2024-10-08 16:00:05

By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.

Attorneys general from 14 states and districts sued TikTok for allegedly harming kids’ mental health and misleading the public about how safe its platform is.

The bipartisan group of AGs, led by New York’s Letitia James and California’s Rob Bonta, each filed lawsuits alleging violations of their own state’s law. “Our investigation has revealed that TikTok cultivates social media addiction to boost corporate profits,” Bonta said in a statement. “TikTok intentionally targets children because they know kids do not yet have the defenses or capacity to create healthy boundaries around addictive content.” James called the lawsuits part of an effort “to protect young people and help combat the nationwide youth mental health crisis.”

The suits argue TikTok violated the law by designing features and promoting content harmful to children. It’s a strategy that’s had some success in overcoming the liability shield of Section 230, which protects services from lawsuits over user speech. The AGs accuse TikTok of using addictive features that keep kids on the app longer, like autoplaying videos, promoting live content and stories that are only available temporarily, and offering beauty filters on videos. They also reference dangerous challenges that have gone viral on TikTok and, in some cases, been connected to teens’ deaths.