Montana AG sues TikTok, alleging platform is addictive, harmful to youth mental health

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen filed a lawsuit Thursday against TikTok, alleging the social media platform knowingly shared addictive and harmful content with children and teens.

The suit follows an investigation by the Montana Department of Justice, which discovered "virtually endless amounts of extreme and mature videos presented to children as young as thirteen," Knudsen's office said in a release.

The filing alleges TikTok targeted young users when designing the platform to be addictive and then misrepresented the content being shown on the app in violation of the Montana Consumer Protection Act. This statute seeks to prevent "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce."

"TikTok must be held accountable for poisoning the minds of children and lying to parents about the videos their children can view on the app. Parents need to know the truth about the content their children have access to on the app and TikTok is pushing to their feeds," Knudsen wrote Thursday.

A spokesperson for TikTok said the company "strongly disagrees" with the claims on the suit, stating they believe most of the allegations are "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," the spokesperson wrote to The Hill. "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 suit specifically takes issue with TikTok's age ratings on a variety of app stores, alleging the platform deceives the public about the frequency of posts that include profanity, crude humor, mature themes, sexual content, and nudity or alcohol or drug use references.

Despite claiming these sorts of posts are "infrequent and mild," the suit argues there are many videos with "hundreds of millions of views" featuring these types of content.

The platform's "effects" that can alter users' appearances are also mentioned in the suit as allegedly being a driving factor in body image issues, eating disorders and other mental health issues.

The suit further alleges the social media company has misled the public when it comes to its restrictive controls by claiming its restrictive model limits the frequency of certain content.

"It does not work the way TikTok claims as even when restricted mode is enabled," Knudsen's office said.

The filing comes nearly two weeks after a slew of other states filed suit against the platform on very similar grounds.

TikTok has a complicated history in the state of Montana.

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) signed a law last year banning the app in the state, but a federal judge later ruled the law violates users' free speech.

It follows a separate crackdown by Congress amid national concerns sparked by TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance.

The platform could face a ban in the U.S. after President Biden signed legislation in April that established a timeline for ByteDance to sell the platform or be prohibited from U.S. app stores and networks.

ByteDance argues divestment is practically impossible, meaning that the law effectively amounts to a nationwide ban of the video-sharing platform.

The Justice Department filed suit against TikTok, ByteDance and their affiliates in August for alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which bans website operations from knowingly collecting or using personal information from kids under 13 without consent from parents.