Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against social media platform TikTok, alleging it has exposed children to “inappropriate and explicit material,” a press release says.
“TikTok actively worked to deceive parents and lure children onto their app despite the presence of an overwhelming amount of profane and illicit material,” Paxton said in a statement. “Companies may not jeopardize the health and wellbeing of Texas children by blatantly lying about the products they provide.”
The platform “falsely represented that the presence of graphic videos depicting drugs, nudity, alcohol, and profanity was ‘infrequent’ and ‘mild,’” the press release explains. “But an investigation found a virtually endless stream of videos on such topics easily accessible to minors.
“While TikTok has established itself as one of the most popular apps in Texas, it has utterly disregarded the health and safety of Texas minors in the process,” the lawsuit says. “TikTok is rife with profanity, sexual content, violence, mature themes, and drug and alcohol content. In an investigation of TikTok, the State discovered virtually endless amounts of extreme and mature videos presented to minors as young as thirteen—some with millions of views.”
“Much of this content would shock the conscience of an individual of any age, let alone impressionable minors,” the filing asserts.
The lawsuit also condemns the platform’s addictive design.
“TikTok presents an endless scroll of videos designed to hook users into a dreamlike state of content consumption. In fact, addictiveness is a core element of TikTok’s business model,” the lawsuit states. “The more time young Texans spend glued to the app, scrolling with no end, the more TikTok can feed them advertisement after advertisement and generate massive profits through ad revenue.”
TikTok is set to be banned in the United States on January 19 unless its parent company, ByteDance, divests itself from the platform.
