Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announced a lawsuit against TikTok, accusing the social media giant of exposing children to adult-themed content and using addictive features.
The complaint filed this week in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, seeks “honesty” from TikTok in how its platform appears in app stores and demands the company take steps to protect child users from becoming addicted to the app.
“TikTok has built its empire based on a model of addictiveness at all costs, and expanded that empire using deception about what sort of content is viewable for kids,” Sunday said. “This is not an indictment against modern technology, or a scolding assessment of social media as a whole — rather, this is an action to hold accountable a company that values dollars over mental wellness.”
The complaint accuses TikTok of lying about how often adult-themed material — such as sexual content and nudity, profanity, and drug use — appears on its platform to achieve an age-13+ app rating in App Stores.
“The TikTok app contains frequent and intense sexual content and nudity, profanity and crude humor, mature and suggestive themes, and alcohol, tobacco, and drug use and references. TikTok knew and intended to evade the parental controls on Apple devices when it rated its app “’12+,’ and now ’13,'” the complaint says.
During a public announcement Tuesday, Sunday referenced teenTALK events last school year when he heard from students who feel trapped on TikTok.
The lawsuit claims TikTok profits from the more time users spend on its platforms scrolling and generating ad revenue for the company.
“Endless scrolling compels young users to spend more time on the platform by making it difficult to
disengage,” the lawsuit reads.
The complaint accuses the social media platform of being aware of its addictive nature and the safeguards that could be implemented to protect kids, but choosing to ignore them.
NBC10 reached out to TikTok for comment on the lawsuit. TikTok responded with a statement, saying in part:
“This lawsuit relies on misleading and inaccurate claims and deliberately ignores the concrete safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community. Teen accounts have 50 preset safety, privacy and security settings built-in, and TikTok’s Family Pairing tools give parents direct control over screen time and content filters,” a spokesperson said.
The Pennsylvania lawsuit comes as other states are also taking aim at social media companies using a similar legal approach.
“For a long time, there were all of these suits ‘My child or I saw something upsetting on social media’ and those were pretty much uniformly legal theories that were not successful,” Villanova University professor Peter Ormerod said.
Ormerod said these kinds of lawsuits have been more successful than others.
“Now whether it will ultimately result in a great deal of accountability for these platforms is anyone’s guess, that’s the kind of thing that is going to be resolved in courthouses across the country,” Ormerod said.
The Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance, a statewide child abuse prevention organization, shared the following statement in response to the lawsuit:
“Parents deserve a role in creating healthy digital environments for their children. But this lawsuit raises several important questions about how parents are expected to evaluate every intricacy of a platform in order to make an informed decision. An age rating is not the same thing as developmental appropriateness, and technology used by a child must be designed with their development in mind,” the organization wrote.
Click here to read the full complaint.
