Following in the footsteps of Nebraska, the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, and New Jersey filed complaints against TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, Ltd., on October 8, 2024.
The suits are lengthy and full of allegations against TikTok and how it is responsible for a “profound mental health crisis” of American teenagers. The suits allege that TikTok designed its social media platform to target youth and “manipulates them into habitual use, and mines the data produced by their excessive and compulsive use for more and more profit.”
The New Jersey complaint alleges that, for American youth, there are no limits on its use and that it is designed to promote excessive use. On the other hand, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, known as Douyin, “limits which hours in the day young users can access it and for how long. Chinese youth are required to wait through a five-second pause between videos when they spend too much time on Douyin. Some are limited to 40 minutes of use per day.” This revelation is telling—the Chinese version of TikTok requires limitations on use by young users but does not restrict and, in fact, encourages unhealthy levels of use for American youth.
The complaints each outline in detail how TikTok lured Americans between 13 and 17 to become users and how TikTok designed its platform “to promote excessive, compulsive, and addictive use” and achieved young users’ usage to “almost constantly.” The complaints all outline how the use of TikTok by young users has been harmful to them. California alleges that “TikTok designs and provides beauty filters that it knows harm its young users” and that “encourage unhealthy, negative social comparison-which, in turn, can cause body image issues and related mental and physical disorders.” In addition, it alleges that “the platform’s addictive qualities, and the resulting excessive use by minors, harms those minors’ mental and physical health. Among the harms suffered by TikTok’s younger users are abnormal neurological changes, insufficient sleep, inadequate socialization with others, and increased risk of mood disorders such as depression and anxiety.” If that isn’t enough to get off TikTok, I don’t know what is. The federal government and some state governments prohibit employees from using TikTok. Montana attempted to prohibit its use and was sued by TikTok. In a rare bipartisan move, Congress passed—and President Biden signed—legislation prohibiting TikTok from use in the U.S. That law is being challenged in litigation by TikTok, a Chinese-based platform, on First Amendment grounds. Now, four state Attorneys General are sounding the alarm about the harmful effects on youth in our country when using TikTok. How much is enough for people to understand the national security threat that TikTok poses and the threat it poses to our children?
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