Over a dozen states are suing TikTok, according to news reports breaking today, in a fresh bipartisan move against the massively popular social media app. This collection of lawsuits goes after TikTok’s user experience, alleging that the company misled the American public over the app’s impact on youth mental health outcomes and addictive behavior.
Stephen Kent, media director of the Consumer Choice Center, reacted with skepticism about the new effort to target TikTok, “TikTok has an ownership problem, not a features problem. We’ve been highly critical of TikTok’s ownership structure and supportive of the federal effort to force ByteDance Ltd. to divest its majority stake in the app for the sake of user’s online security and privacy. This lawsuit is something different, and the ultimate target is, in fact, all social media firms that consumers enjoy.”
The lawsuits take issue with TikTok’s most notable features, including autoplay, “beauty” filters, and push notifications. Similar efforts have been aimed at Meta in October 2023.
Stephen Kent continued, “Read over these lawsuits and you’ll see that TikTok could be removed from the text and replaced with almost any other popular social media app. This effort is indicative of a legislative panic over algorithms and customized user experiences and would lead us to a one-size-fits-all future in which consumers’ online experiences are all alike. TikTok is popular precisely because its technology is so powerful at figuring out the likes and dislikes of the user. No one wants to be on an app where they hate everything they see. These lawsuits are antithetical to consumer choice online.”
The Consumer Choice Center encourages the process of divestiture to go forward in federal court and for ByteDance to do the right thing for its users by allowing TikTok to be operated by an entity with independence from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The right approach is for social media firms to be accountable to the consumers they serve, and TikTok cannot do that with its current connection to the Chinese government.
Read more from the Consumer Choice Center: Don’t Co-Parent with Congress (Reason Magazine, Yahoo! News)
“Parents who are concerned about their children’s online behaviors and exposure to harmful content can take action today by adopting alternative smartphone technology that helps them moderate their child’s online experience. I have spoken at length about the perks of the Bark Phone, Gabb, Troomi, and Pinwheel phones, as alternatives to government action. There’s a robust market for family-friendly tech experiences and consumers don’t have to wait on courtrooms or lawmakers to help their children navigate social media more safely,” concluded Kent.