More than a dozen states sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an app designed to be addictive to children and teens.
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.