Summary
TikTokis being sued by over a dozen states, who allege that the popular social media app is harming children. The litigation adds toTikTok’s growing list of stateside legal troubles.
Aside from the looming threat of its nationwide ban, which could go into effect as early as January 2025, the ByteDance-owned app has recently faced a string of other legal issues in the United States, its second-largest foreign market. Recently, a U.S. collective of over 5,000parents sued TikTok for being addictive, arguing that the social media platform is having a severe negative impact on America’s youth.
One-Quarter of U.S. States Are Collectively Suing TikTok
A similar complaint has now been filed by 13 states and the District of Columbia in early October 2024. The lawsuit claims that the app is deceivingly labeling itself as safe for children, in spite of being designed to be addictive. It hence poses amental healthrisk to its users, particularly young ones, who might not yet be self-aware enough to recognize it as such, according to the complaint. In a statement provided toCNBC, District of Columbia Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb called TikTok “digital nicotine,” stating that the lawsuit seeks to hold the social media giant “accountable for harming D.C. children.”
TikTok Labels Addiction Lawsuit as ‘Inaccurate and Misleading’
TikTok has rejected these allegations as “inaccurate and misleading.” In an October 8 statement, a company representative wrote that the social media app has already voluntarily taken a variety of steps meant to make it safe for children, including launching features like screen time limits that are turned on by default for users under 16. The group also claimed that it has been trying to work with Attorneys General on these issues for over two years, in addition to suggesting that the concerns outlined in the newly filed lawsuits are “industrywide challengers” rather than TikTok-specific problems.
Cases of this nature—which involve a double-digit number of plaintiffs and a complex set of allegations—ordinarily take a considerable amount of time to be resolved. Given howTikTok appears adamant to vigorously defend itself, a rough time frame for this lawsuit’s resolution would be between two and five years. And while most lawsuits never go to trial, the intense stateside scrutiny TikTok has faced in recent years makes a settlement less likely in this case.
This litigation was brought forward two months after theDepartment of Justice also sued TikTok, alleging that the social media platform is unlawfully collecting data on millions of children. The app itself is estimated to have 170 million U.S. users. This group is believed to include over half of Americans aged between 13 and 17.
