AG Coleman sues TikTok, says internal documents show company knowingly addicted Kentucky youth

Kentucky joins a dozen other states and Washington DC in suing TikTok, saying the social media company targets young people in every state and is knowingly addicted to the platform.

TikTok knew the social media platform was harmful to young people and tried to keep them active on the platform, Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman alleges in a new lawsuit. Using internal documents, the lawsuit alleges that TikTok was aware that their safety measures were largely ineffective in reducing young people’s screen time or protecting them from harmful content that violates TikTok’s own guidelines.

“TikTok is specifically designed as an addiction machine, aimed at children who are still developing proper self-control. It doesn’t take much for our children to enter a digital world of unrealistic beauty standards, bullying and low self-esteem,” Coleman said in a statement. “If we don’t hold TikTok accountable, our children will suffer the very real consequences. Nothing less than their mental, physical and emotional health is at stake.”

Large portions of the 119-page lawsuits in Kentucky have been redacted; However, Kentucky Public Radio was able to read the text under the digital editor, which appeared to mainly quote and summarize findings from internal TikTok documents and communications.

More than a dozen other attorneys general from across the political spectrum have also sued TikTok, saying the company misled the public about the platform’s security. Attorneys general in New York, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont and Washington have all filed under their state’s consumer protection laws or district.

“TikTok intentionally manipulates the release of dopamine in the developing brains of young users and causes them to use TikTok in an excessive, compulsive, and addictive manner, harming them both mentally and physically,” according to the Kentucky lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday filed in Scott County. .

Like most social media apps, TikTok tries to keep users engaged for as long as possible. But the lawsuit alleges that certain design features encourage excessive use and harm young users, including a hyper-personalized algorithm that creates content “rabbit holes,” the ability to scroll endlessly, and the app’s use of push notifications.

TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek told NPR The allegations in the lawsuits are misleading, saying they had hoped the attorneys general would have worked with the company on “constructive solutions to industry-wide challenges.”

“We provide robust safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched safety features such as default screen time limits, family linking, and default privacy for minors under 16,” Haurek said.

TikTok is already facing other challenges in the US, most notably a nationwide ban on the app that will take effect on January 19 unless the company bows to an ultimatum that it cut ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance.

TikTok does not allow children under the age of 13 to use the platform. However, the lawsuit claims that the app does not use age verification software. Young TikTok users are also not allowed to send direct messages and their accounts are automatically set to private. The app also uses screen time reminders to let users know how long they have been scrolling.

Those same security features are also at issue in the lawsuit, as Coleman’s office claims the company knew that “none of TikTok’s safeguards meaningfully offset the real and pervasive harm caused by its design elements.”

In ineffectively redacted portions of the lawsuit, the state summarizes internal documents in which TikTok employees appear to acknowledge that their goal with such safeguards, like the screen time nudges, was to have a limited effect on actual screen time, and indeed seemed to have a ‘negligible impact’.

“However, to address these harms, TikTok measured the tool’s success not by whether it actually reduced the time teens spent on the platform, but by three unrelated ‘success metrics,’ the first of which is ‘ increasing public trust in TikTok’. platform through media reporting,” the lawsuit reads.

According to the court, in an experiment with on-screen time usage cues, which TikTok publicly refers to as a limit, the average time per day that teens spent on the platform went from 108.5 minutes to about 107 minutes.

“Despite seeing this result and the fact that the decrease in screen time was far less than the amount TikTok expected and approved as acceptable, the company did not rethink the design of the tool to be more effective in preventing from excessive use of TikTok. ‘ reads the lawsuit in court in Kentucky.

The lawsuit also alleges that TikTok was aware of how harmful overuse could be, especially for minors, pointing to things like disrupted sleep patterns and filters that the state says promote specific beauty standards. In redacted portions of the lawsuit, the state cites an internal document saying the effect perpetuates “a narrow standard of beauty” that “could negatively impact the well-being of our community.”

The lawsuit cited another internal document alleging that the algorithm at one point prioritized videos with “unappealing subject matter” and that TikTok addressed what the company saw as a problem by changing their algorithm. The wording seems to suggest that the company, after learning that an algorithm was amplifying what it considered unattractive people, knowingly changed the algorithm to exclude those people.

The state also argued that internal documents showed TikTok valued young users, including those in Kentucky. One internal report cited appeared to analyze the preferences and demographics of new users classified as “national.”

“This analysis of users – including their areas of interest and their specific locations in Kentucky – was done for the purpose of increasing TikTok’s market share within the Commonwealth,” the lawsuit alleges.

The attorneys general also argue that TikTok’s mitigation efforts are ineffective harmful content to filter through to young users. They also claim that TikTok’s livestream feature is often abused and that thousands of underage users have hosted live-streamed videos in which users can pay to send digital currency in the form of TikTok “gifts.” The lawsuits allege the videos encouraged the sexual exploitation of children.

“The existence of these virtual rewards greatly increases the risk that adult predators will target adolescent users for sexual exploitation,” the Kentucky complaint reads.

Coleman’s office asked the court to find that TikTok violated the rules Kentucky Consumer Protection Act and awarding the state up to $2,000 for each violation, issuing an injunction against TikTok and ordering TikTok to forfeit all profits from its “ill-gotten gains.”

Joe Sonka of Kentucky Public Radio contributed to this report.

Coverage of state government and politics is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.