More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia have launched lawsuits against TikTok. Fourteen attorneys general filed the suits Tuesday, each alleging the social media titan’s platform harms the mental health of children.
“Young people are struggling with their mental health because of addictive social media platforms like TikTok,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who co-led the coalition’s lawsuit filings, said in a news release. “TikTok claims that their platform is safe for young people, but that is far from true. In New York and across the country, young people have died or gotten injured doing dangerous TikTok challenges and many more are feeling more sad, anxious, and depressed because of TikTok’s addictive features. Today, we are suing TikTok to protect young people and help combat the nationwide youth mental health crisis. Kids and families across the country are desperate for help to address this crisis, and we are doing everything in our power to protect them.”
In a statement to CBS MoneyWatch, a TikTok spokesperson said: “We strongly disagree with these claims, many of which we believe to be inaccurate and misleading. We’re proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we’ve done to protect teens and we will continue to update and improve our product.”
“We provide robust safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched safety features such as default screentime limits, family pairing, and privacy by default for minors under 16,” the spokesperson said, adding, “We’ve endeavored to work with the Attorneys General for over two years, and it is incredibly disappointing they have taken this step rather than work with us on constructive solutions to industrywide challenges.”
However, some social media challenges have had tragic outcomes. One TikTok trend, the blackout challenge, is reportedly “luring young kids to their deaths.” According to Bloomberg, 15 children ages 12 and younger died within an 18-month period alone.
According to research conducted by Amnesty International, in partnership with the Algorithmic Transparency Institute and AI Forensics, there are also links between TikTok’s “For You” page and poorer mental health, even self-harm.
“Between 3 and 20 minutes into our manual research, more than half of the videos in the ‘For You’ feed were related to mental health struggles with multiple recommended videos in a single hour romanticizing, normalizing or encouraging suicide,” the nonprofit reported.
A 2023 study helmed by University of Minnesota computer science researchers also discovered that TikTok’s mental health content can be “distressing and triggering” to users. The platform’s algorithm often suggests similar content, creating a rabbit hole of potentially harmful material.
“One of our participants jokingly referred to the For You page as a ‘dopamine slot machine,’” first author Ashlee Milton told the university. “They talked about how they would keep scrolling just so that they could get to a good post because they didn’t want to end on a bad post. It’s important to be able to recognize what is happening and say, ‘Okay, let’s not do that.’”
Addiction is another major thread of the multistate lawsuits.
“Our investigation has revealed that TikTok cultivates social media addiction to boost corporate profits,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a news release. “TikTok intentionally targets children because they know kids do not yet have the defenses or capacity to create healthy boundaries around addictive content. When we look at the youth mental health crisis and the revenue machine TikTok has created, fueled by the time and attention of our young people, it’s devastatingly obvious: our children and teens never stood a chance against these social media behemoths. TikTok must be held accountable for the harms it created in taking away the time — and childhoods — of American children.”
According to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, TikTok has more than a billion users as the most-used social media app among kids 12-17. Around 63% of users in that age range, the alliance reported, use the app on a weekly basis.
A 2022 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology reported that TikTok is the most addictive social media platform because of its “advanced algorithm systems.”
“Based on our findings, concentration was the most important factor leading to TikTok addiction behavior, therefore, algorithms and systems should be optimized to design an effective function that can interrupt users who have been immersed in TikTok for an excessive amount of time or recommend short educational videos to cultivate users to form healthy TikTok usage habits,” the researchers said.
According to a news release by the New York state attorney general, the multistate lawsuits are seeking financial penalties in the form of damages collected for harmed users and the “disgorgement of all profits resulting from the fraudulent and illegal practices.”
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