Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul on Tuesday joined 13 other states and the District of Columbia in filing lawsuits that accuse TikTok of harmful business practices for allegedly targeting children and deceiving the public about the social media platform’s dangers.
The suit comes nearly a year after Raoul joined 32 other states in a federal lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram company Meta Platforms Inc., claiming the platforms are addictive and exploiting psychological vulnerabilities of children.
“While TikTok has internally known that excessive and addictive use of its platform can be harmful to children and teenagers, it has failed to protect young users in the United States by offering a safer version of the platform. Especially concerning is that the version of TikTok used in the United States does not contain the same protections for children that are found in China,” Raoul said at a news conference on Tuesday.
“In Illinois, we always put our children and young people first,” Raoul continued. “I am committed to holding TikTok and any other social media companies accountable for putting profits ahead of our children’s safety and well-being.”
Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, stems from an investigation announced by Raoul in March 2022. The state is seeking injunctive relief to address TikTok’s “misconduct,” as well as monetary penalties.
“Defendants’ business model depends on keeping users on Platform for as long as possible, in order both to show them more ads and to catalog their data,” the suit stated. “In service of (their) business model, Defendants perniciously employ an arsenal of addictive-by-design features specifically tailored to exploit, manipulate, and capitalize on the nascent young users’ developing brains, harvesting their data to exploit vulnerabilities unique to each young user.”
The suit also claims the defendants are aware that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has the potential to “engender serious harm for young users,” including sleep deprivation, depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide and death.”
Raoul said young girls are utilizing the platform’s beauty filters, which are blurring the lines of reality and can contribute to harm.
“Online features like this foster unrealistic beauty standards and are especially dangerous to young users because they can cause negative self obsession or self-hatred of their appearance,” Raoul said. “… TikTok’s decision to push these appearance-altering effects on kids, despite its knowledge of the harm, is immoral and a violation of our law outlawing unfair business practices.”
Raoul is seeking to enforce state consumer protection laws to stop the platform from capitalizing on young users and wants to hold the defendants accountable for “unfairly and deceptively designing, operating, and marketing the TikTok Platform to ensnare and addict young users in Illinois,” the suit says.
The suit notes that 6.2 million residents and 280,000 business in Illinois use TikTok.
In a statement, TikTok fought back against the characterizations in the suit — and said it has been trying to work out differences with the attorneys general.
“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. 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,” TikTok spokesman Michael Hughes said.
“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.”
