Massachusetts AG Files Lawsuit Against TikTok
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell filed a lawsuit against TikTok and its affiliated entities this week.
AG Campbell alleges in her lawsuit filed in Suffolk Superior Court that TikTok is specifically designed to “be addictive and harmful to young users and deceiving the public about its efforts to keep its platform safe.” She poses that this is in violation of current Massachusetts consumer protection laws.
In a statement, AG Campbell said, “Massachusetts will not tolerate a future where companies exploit the vulnerabilities of young people for profit. Today’s lawsuit further demonstrates my office’s focus on the wellbeing of our children by laying out arguments that TikTok, primarily driven by greed, designed technology that leads young people to become compulsive and addicted users of the platform, harming their wellbeing and contributing to the ongoing youth mental health crisis across our country.”
AG Campbell argues that TikTok is harmful to young users due to many of its features. Among those features are infinite scroll, autoplay and push notifications. These features and more “work to override young users’ agency and psychologically manipulate them into compulsive and addictive use of the platform.”
The filing notes that TikTok says its platform is safe. However, the popular social media channel has “rejected design changes that would reduce compulsive use.”
AG Campbell hopes her lawsuit will lead to TikTok to make necessary changes to make it safer for young people to use. In October 2023, AG Campbell filed a similar lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. That lawsuit is still ongoing.
Could TikTok Still Be Banned in the United States?
The Massachusettes TikTok lawsuit comes as the potential of a ban on the platform in the United States still looms. Per The Washington Post, Congress passed a law in April that required TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to shut down or sell to a non-Chinese owner, if it still wanted to operate in the U.S.
In September, a hearing before three federal judges had prominent TikTok creators deliver testimony that the potential ban of the platform was a violation of free speech. The U.S. government’s issue with the Beijing-based ByteDance is the possibility of manipulation of user data and of users themselves via its algorithm.
The deadline for the sale of TikTok is January 19, 2025, but there will be a court ruling about the free speech issue in December. Depending on the ruling of the federal judges, this gives the legal representation of ByteDance time to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
