South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson joins a group of 22 other attorney generals that have sued TikTok over its business practices.
In his action, filed Tuesday in a Richland County court, Wilson condemned TikTok, accusing the social media giant of making addictiveness a “core element” of a business model that generates advertising revenue while knowingly exposing young people to a flood of harmful content.
The consequence is that young users allegedly experience depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and in some cases, suicide, allegedly with the full knowledge of the app’s makers, according to the lawsuit.
“TikTok is knowingly addicting children to their platform and monetizing this behavior, all while deceiving parents about the safety of their business model,” Wilson said in statement released Tuesday.
TikTok’s actions violate the South Carolina Unfair Trade Practices Act, the attorney general’s office argues, by designing and promoting a product that they knew to be addictive while making false statements about the app’s age rating and its safety tools for users.
The lawsuit seeks to impose a $5,000 fine for each violation of the Unfair Trade Practices Act and stop TikTok from engaging in these practices, which the lawsuit argues are a core part of TikTok’s business model.
In a statement provided to The State, a spokesman for TikTok wrote, “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.”
With over 150 million users in the United States and at least one billion globally, based on most estimates, the app is one of the world’s largest social media platforms.
But this latest, bipartisan legal action ramps up pressure on the Chinese-owned app, which has found itself at the center of the national debate around social media. Supporters of the app say that it builds community, helps small business and allows people to express themselves, while critics have raised alarm over data privacy and its addictive design, which funnels users, especially teens, towards misinformation and extreme content.
Concern over the app has drawn contradictory lines in national politics. Former president Donald Trump earlier this year said that he was “for TikTok,” despite trying to ban it in 2020. This came after President Joe Biden signed a law in April ordering that TikTok be sold within a year or face a nationwide ban, just two months after he made his TikTok debut during the Super Bowl.
Wilson’s lawsuit was filed simultaneously Tuesday along with 13 other attorney generals, from California, New York, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia. These joined existing lawsuits from attorney generals in Utah, Nevada, Indiana, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and Texas.
What does the lawsuit say?
The central allegation of Wilson’s lawsuit is that TikTok’s design includes manipulative features and is intentionally addictive in order to keep children and teens scrolling longer. And while the app has marketed its community guidelines and safety features including “Restricted Mode,” family pairing and “screen time management,” the attorney general’s office alleges that these feature do not actually limit younger users’ access to mature content.
One feature that the lawsuit draws particular attention to is the “infinite” scrolling, which allows users to seamlessly move from video to video simply by swiping.
Citing research from psychologists, Wilson argues in the lawsuit that this experience puts users into a “flow state,” a “dreamlike state of content consumption” that “distorts their perception of time.”
“The more time young South Carolinians spend glued to the app, scrolling with no end, the more TikTok can feed them targeted advertisement after advertisement and generate massive profits through ad revenue,” according to the lawsuit.
Notifications, time sensitive vanishing content, beauty filters, in-app rewards including likes and badges are all part of what the lawsuit characterizes as a dopamine-inducing reward system. This design, according to the lawsuit, overrides the ability of young users to self-regulate as “their developing brains are not equipped to resist TikTok’s manipulative tactics.”
The end result, according to Wilson, is mass addiction. Supporting this, Wilson pointed to data from the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank, which found 63% of American teenagers aged between 13 and 17 using TikTok, and with most TikTok users logging onto the app daily.
“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,” said a spokesperson from TikTok.
Wilson’s office alleges that the features like the algorithm refresh, which resets a user’s feed, and restricted mode, which is designed to limit certain kinds of content, fail to keep harmful content off of the app.
Many specifics about these charges, including what appear to be internal TikTok documents, are redacted in the lawsuit. The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for clarification about these redactions.
Additionally, while TikTok advertises the app as being for ages 12 and above, Wilson argues that teens and pre-teens are exposed to videos containing violence, profanity, sexual content as well as drugs and alcohol. While the app’s heavily promoted “community guidelines” are designed to limited this kind of content, failure to actually enforce these guidelines through content moderation or other processes amounts to deceptive and misleading business practices, according to the lawsuit.
But according to the TikTok, they aren’t the only app with these issues.
“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,” said spokesman Michael Hughes.
TikTok in South Carolina
Policymakers and elected officials in South Carolina have largely line up against TikTok in the past several years, but the opposition is not unanimous.
South Carolina Democrat James Clyburn and Republican Nancy Mace voted against the sale of the app , with Mace saying “banning TikTok is beating the same drum as other communist countries controlling what content we are able to see.”
The other five members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation, all Republicans, voted for the ban, with congressman Jeff Duncan calling the app a “national security threat.”
Meanwhile, citing warnings from federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster banned TikTok from government devices in the state, calling the app “a clear and present danger to its users.
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