Texas AG accuses TikTok of exposing children to explicit content

(CN) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued TikTok Thursday, accusing the social media platform of falsely marketing itself as safe for children while hosting videos containing drugs, sexual material and other inappropriate content.

In a complaint filed in Galveston County District Court on behalf of the state of Texas, Paxton claims TikTok violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by listing itself as appropriate for children on app stores. He accuses TikTok of falsely representing that content on its platform depicting drugs, nudity, alcohol and profanity is “infrequent” and “mild.”

In reality, Paxton says, an investigation by the Texas Attorney General’s Office found that the platform is “rife” with such content.

“The state discovered virtually endless amounts of extreme and mature videos presented to minors as young as thirteen — some with millions of views,” Paxton writes in the complaint. “Much of this content would shock the conscience of an individual of any age, let alone impressionable minors.”

Paxton also claims in the lawsuit that TikTok has purposefully designed its platform to be addictive.

“TikTok presents an endless scroll of videos designed to hook users into a dreamlike state of content consumption,” the attorney general writes. “In fact, addictiveness is a core element of TikTok’s business model. 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.”

Paxton is asking the court to impose civil penalties on TikTok and to enjoin the platform from making false representations about its content and age suitability.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

“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.”

This suit comes as TikTok is experiencing a deluge of other legal troubles. Paxton filed another lawsuit against the platform in October, accusing it of violating Texas law by sharing minors’ personal data without parental consent.

And Texas is not the first to have brought a case against the embattled app for its purported explicit content and addictive properties — the District of Columbia sued the platform in October, along with suits from at least 13 states including Nebraska.

TikTok is also currently fighting at the Supreme Court to block a federal law requiring its Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the platform or else it will be banned in the U.S.

Proponents of the law claim TikTok poses a national security risk due to ByteDance’s purported ties to the Chinese government, but TikTok argues the law violates the First Amendment and threatens the freedom of speech of its users. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in the case Friday.